


Streets

by apparitionism



Series: Regent [8]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, Not AU, except in terms of no S4 or S5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-01-05 09:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18363647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: Just for fun, here’s one of those where we pretend that the Warehouse came back from the explosion, the rest of the show never happened, and everybody lived happily ever after… I’m putting this in my “they made Helena a Regent” bucket, for some vague sense of consistency. In any case, if they had in fact given Helena that job, some agent and some Regent might have gone on vacation together every now and then. But just because you’re living happily ever after in a general sense, that doesn’t mean your vacation will go as planned, right? This one should be reasonably short and, one hopes, a bit sweet: an interrupted holiday, an artifact, maybe a friendly wager. People talk to each other. Nothing of great import.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written because of, and for, @blackfoxreddog. Down payment of sorts on an IOU.

It is not, Helena tries to admonish herself into believing, that she minds seeing Pete and Claudia. It is not that at all. It is not even that she minds eating lunch with Pete and Claudia, despite the abysmal table manners exhibited by both of them. It is simply that she and Myka have been alone for four days, and had anticipated being alone for four more. Yet here Pete and Claudia are.

She hears Myka tell them, “San Francisco is lovely. We’re enjoying it.”

“San Francisco _is_ lovely,” Helena affirms. “We _are_ enjoying it.”

They gaze across the table at Pete and Claudia, who both wince. Claudia says, “If you’re gonna be all weird and formal, you should’ve just told us to buzz off. We would’ve understood.”

“That would have been impolite,” Helena points out.

Pete snorts. “Like that ever stops you.”

Helena entertains the notion of proving his point by stabbing him with her butter knife, but Myka grabs her arm and says, “It’s just that, you know, we’d sort of gotten out of the whole Warehouse… thing.”

“It’s not like anybody _planned_ that ping in Cupertino,” Claudia says. “And you should probably be happy that Artie didn’t make you two take care of it, seeing as how you were already left-coastally located.”

“We’re on vacation. We _wouldn’t_ have taken care of it,” Myka tells Claudia. Helena is gratified by the speed with which that response came. She sets her butter knife down and takes Myka’s hand. She is gratified once again by the speed with which a smile engulfs Myka’s face.

****

They have, in these short four days, managed to settle into a decadently lovely morning routine: Myka gets up first—early, as she is constitutionally unable to sleep late—and makes coffee; she showers. Helena drowses. Then Myka drinks her coffee while Helena takes a turn in the bathroom, mainly to use the facilities and brush her teeth. Then they return to bed, and that first kiss of the morning, one that combines coffee and mint, is delicious.

This morning, Helena had moved particularly lazily, heavily, to such an extent that Myka said, “This doesn’t seem to be fully _working_ for you.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying it.”

“Are you tired?”

“A bit.” She tried to stifle a yawn.

Myka smiled. “We’re not on any schedule, for this or anything else. Go back to sleep. I’ll just read for a while, okay?”

Helena reposed against Myka’s shoulder, not asleep, not awake, feeling a whisper of air every time Myka turned a page. She drifted, tasting mint, smelling coffee. Her eyelids opened, closed, opened again; it must have been the brush of her eyelashes that made Myka chuckle, deep in her chest, and say, “That tickles.” They breathed together for a moment. Then Myka said, “I’ve never been able to do this very well.”

“Do what? Read? You’ve certainly faked it impressively, then; I’ve always believed you were quite good at it.”

“Intimacy. This kind of intimacy.” She waved her book over their draped-together bodies.

“What is that term Claudia uses when I act as if I understand something about modernity that I do not in fact understand?”

“She says you’re fronting.”

“So I would say that you seem to be fronting quite well in the intimacy arena, also.”

“It’s a silly word. Fronting. Especially when you say it.”

“Silly but descriptive. Perhaps you’d prefer façading?”

Myka shrugged. “I thought maybe I was. Fronting, I mean. Façading? Maybe not intentionally, but… anyway. Now we’ve had four days in a hotel room.”

“We’ve left the hotel room. Not to mention, we’ve had four days in a hotel room on a case.”

“You know what I mean. It’s different.”

“Four days in a hotel room and counting,” Helena reminded her. “I haven’t been able to do it well either. In the past. I have perhaps façaded. Intentionally.”

“Are you now?”

“No. Well. Not as far as I am consciously aware.”

“What’s different now?”

“I don’t want to speculate too wildly, but I suspect it’s you.”

“Yeah… me too. I mean vice versa. I was suspecting it was you.”

“Wild speculation on your part as well.”

“Mm.” Myka set her book aside. “Are you still tired?”

“Experience indicates that if I am, you’ll be able to tell.”

“And if you’re not?”

“Oh, I think that, too, will be reasonably clear.”

Helena was not, in fact, still tired. But they moved slowly all the same, taking their time, their sweet time, with teasing words about reading and fronting and façading—but also words about love and beauty and luck—flowing treacle-sweet from their mouths.

They had still been in bed when Pete called.

“He says that he and Claudia are in the neighborhood,” Myka reported to Helena.

“What could that possibly mean. Ignore him. We aren’t finished here.”

“It could possibly mean that they’re downstairs in the lobby.”

“That is ridiculous.”

“They want to take us to lunch.”

Helena yawned loudly in the direction of the telephone and said loudly, also in its direction, “At this hour of the morning?” From the telephone, Pete said, equally loudly, “It’s almost one, you lazy sloths!”

“Sloths,” Helena muttered. She pushed at Myka’s hair. “Speaking of sloths, have I mentioned that you have adorably small ears?”

Myka pulled her hair back down over her ear. “Don’t try to distract me—he’s right, it’s almost one. And my ears are perfectly normal.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t normal. I said they were adorably small.”

“Normal- _sized_.”

Pete squawked, “Ears, schmears! And hey, speaking of schmears, it’s lunchtime!”

“Aren’t bagels more a breakfast item?” Myka asked him, though Helena congratulated herself on making it very difficult for Myka to actually direct her mouth toward the telephone.

“It’s all food,” Pete said.

“It’s true that we didn’t have breakfast today. Okay, we’ll be down in fifteen minutes,” Myka said.

But Helena grabbed the telephone, said “twenty minutes and not one instant sooner,” and disconnected. She then let the telephone fall from her hand to the floor and levered herself atop Myka, who blinked up at her and said, “What’s going to take twenty minutes? Your hair looks fine. A little artfully messy, thanks to me, but fine.”

“I do not doubt it. But you were foolish enough not to hang up on Pete immediately, so I intend to make you _regret it_. By demonstrating what you will be _missing_.”

“You’re awful,” Myka said. But she smiled.

“You’ll be saying different words twenty minutes from now,” Helena promised.

Twenty minutes later, in the elevator:

“I stand very effectively corrected,” Myka said. “‘Awful’ is in no way the word for what just happened.” She wound an arm around Helena, which Helena knew to understand as quite a gesture, even for this only potentially semi-public space. Even for this only potentially semi-public space _in San Francisco_.

Helena smiled. “First: true. Second: thank you. And finally: you owe me.”

“That is… also correct.”

Helena widened her smile, but she also managed to kiss the adorably small ear that she found nearest her mouth.

****

Myka now asks the two non-vacationers: “So how was the weather in Cupertino?”

“Seriously, weather?” Claudia rolls her eyes.

Myka rolls hers right back. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“I’m so glad you asked. Let’s go with all the ways this entire Warehouse operation needs to join the twenty-first century.”

“God, not this again,” Pete says. “I think maybe Cupertino itself’s an artifact… she’s been nonstop ‘more tech’ since yesterday.”

“I’m just saying, if I’m eventually gonna be the one looking down from some kind of _on high_ with this thing, I’d like to think I could look at people not carbon-footprinting around like dinosaurs. Like for example let’s help Pete kick his SUV addiction and start using Uber.” She takes an enormous bite of her smoked duck sandwich. Helena is fairly certain that sandwich is intended to be far too refined a dish to be bolted down. “Tell him I’m right, H.G.”

“I am enjoying a lovely tea soup,” Helena says, “and I don’t care.”

“Tell him I’m right, Myka.”

“I don’t actually care either,” Myka says.

Pete complains, “It’s not an addiction—I’m a big guy, I need a big car. And Uber’s stupid.”

Claudia is still chewing her previous bite of sandwich as she says, “Uber happens to be next-level transportation. I feel like a grandma standing at that rental counter with you.”

“I think you’re forgetting one thing, young Jedi,” Pete says. He too is eating a sandwich unmindfully, in his case chicken salad.

“That you get all manly and weird about not being the one who drives?”

He makes a buzzer noise. “Car chases! Can’t do that in an Uber!”

“When was the last time you were actually in a car chase?” Claudia asks him.

Myka jumps in with, “Claudia might have a point here, Pete. Taking car chases off the table, I mean.” She stops. “Then again, there’s the problem of communication. Can’t speak freely in the back of a cab, Uber or otherwise. And I never understand Pete when he’s trying to speak in code.”

“Plus all those drivers are as bad at it as H.G. is,” Pete says.

This makes Helena look up from her soup. “I object.”

“Why?” Myka asks. Now she is mid-bite. Hers, however, is of a salad.

“He insulted my driving skills!”

“Everybody insults your driving skills,” Myka says, and if this is meant to be reassuring—

Claudia adds, “Because you don’t have any.”

At this, Helena puts down her spoon. “ _Steve_ has never.”

“Steve’s just a really nice guy,” Pete says.

Now Helena pushes her soup away. “Steve is my _favorite_.”

Myka pulls Helena’s soup toward her, with a questioning look, and Helena nods. “Steve’s your favorite, huh?” she asks, then takes a sip. Helena nods again. Myka smiles. “So neither my love for you nor your supposed love for me outweighs the fact that Steve has never insulted your driving skills. Okay.” She nudges her own plate at Helena.

“Also Uber would be cheaper,” Claudia says.

“Wouldn’t that depend on how much legwork the case involves?” Myka asks.

Helena tries a forkful of salad. What remains is primarily, and quite substantially, slivers of beetroot. Myka does not prefer beetroot… “Although,” Helena says, “you might weigh more heavily the _need_ for legwork, in the event that you had to pay for each leg separately.”

“Ha!” Claudia sandwiches. “You know, that might be the winning argument with Artie.”

“It won’t be,” Myka tells her. Then she tells Helena, “You were right. I should’ve got the soup.”

“I did draw your attention to the beets,” Helena says, and “pour more tea over it,” she suggests.

“You two,” Claudia sighs. “Thank god you aren’t always like this. And I’m gonna call Artie, on the basis of I think he’ll agree with me.”

“He won’t,” Myka says. She pours more tea over the soup.

“Bet me. I dare you.”

“Fine. I’ll bet you a dollar.”

“What am I supposed to do with a dollar?”

Pete says, “Frame it. With a little engraved plaque that says ‘I won this off Myka.’”

“She won’t,” Myka says.

Just then, Claudia’s Farnsworth buzzes. She looks at it in amazement. “See now, I thought I got to turn into the psychic one. Hey Art Moderne, what’s your take on Uber?”

“Price gouging,” is the immediate response.

“It’s dy-na-mic pri-cing,” Claudia articulates carefully.

“AKA price gouging,” Artie says.

Myka holds out her hand, and Claudia snorts. “Like I carry cash.”

Tinnily, Artie says, “I don’t care what you carry other than a Farnsworth and a Tesla! There’s a ping!”

Claudia shakes her head at Helena, Myka, and Pete, as if to convey what a shame it is that Artie is in his dotage. Into the Farnsworth, she says, “There _was_ a ping. Me and Pete took care of it, remember? Now we’re just relaxing with our good friends Myka and H.G. before we catch our Uber to the airport… no, wait, we have to waste a bunch of time turning in a rental car. Because we flew in from 1985.”

“Will you be quiet!” Artie thunders, and Helena is just as happy to be across the table, unable to see his face on the screen. “There _is_ a ping. _Another_ ping, right there in San Francisco. Get on it! Steve’s sending you the particulars, but it has something to do with reports of people claiming to have been abducted by aliens.”

“Isn’t that just ‘a regular day’?” Claudia asks. “Particularly here in the city of brotherly crazy people? Nothing against the vibe, but it’s—”

“No more editorializing! Get to work! I’m just relieved you’re already there and I won’t have to pay for more airline tickets.”

“But see, Artie, this is my Uber point, that it’d be cheaper if—” She looks at the now-dead Farnsworth. She gives it a halfhearted shake. “He hung up on me.”

“Shocking,” Helena says. “Unprecedented.” But she is breathing easy—perhaps the first time she has ever truly done so at the news of a curiosity. For now, at last, Pete and Claudia will take wing via whatever mode of transportation they prefer, and she and Myka will be left to return to—

“I’ve got an idea,” Claudia says.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 1 tumblr tags: not even AU!, mostly, I mean obviously 'happiness'=AU as far as these loons are concerned, so too 'actual intimacy', but still I am an aficionado of dreaming the impossible dream, and incidentally another impossible dream of mine, is the idea of Myka and HG in extended conversation, are they not such stupidheads?, but now Claudia's got an idea so look out


	2. Chapter 2

Pete grimaces. “That scares me almost as much when you say it as when H.G. does.”

Helena looks pointedly at Myka, who says, “What?”

“Are you not going to defend my honor on _this_ point?”

“Why? I agree with him. You’re a lot of things I enjoy, but you’re also scary when you’ve got an idea.”

“Hadn’t we just established that you owe me?”

“And this is what you want to cash those chips in for? Me telling Pete ‘no, you’re mistaken’ in a really unconvincing tone of voice?”

Helena sighs and shakes her head. “I certainly won’t be cashing in my chips if you can’t be bothered to put on a reasonable dramatic performance.”

“If I’m histrionic, it’ll be even less convincing,” Myka tells her.

“Why do you owe H.G.?” Claudia asks.

Myka turns red.

“Twenty minutes,” Helena says. She suspects she may sound a bit overly pleased with herself, but—

“Oh god,” Pete, Claudia, and Myka all say.

To Myka, Helena says, “You didn’t seem to find _that_ a scary idea. You in fact seemed to find it quite a good idea—so good, in fact, that—” She does not bother to grimace as Myka slaps a hand over her mouth. Instead, she touches her tongue to Myka’s palm. Not so long ago, such an action, particularly in such a context, would undoubtedly have made Myka jump; now, though, she merely rolls her eyes, as if she had expected something of the sort—particularly in such a context—and drops her hand, with which she then delivers a soft slap to Helena’s arm. “Undeserved,” Helena protests.

Myka rolls her eyes again. She says, “I’d like to change the subject. Claudia, what’s your idea?”

“Get this: Artifact Retrieval Transportation Tournament 2016. Me and Pete, wheelo a wheelo. An SUV vs Uber smackdown for all the marbles. ‘The Fray by the Bay.’ Nah, that’s boring. What rhymes with ‘Frisco’? No, wait, they don’t like ‘Frisco’…”

“‘The Enmity in the City’?” Helena offers. “If I’m understanding you correctly, that is.”

Claudia lifts only one corner of her mouth. “Eh, it’s not quite ‘the Thrilla in Manila’… ooh, hey, how about this one: ‘Hasbro in the Castro’!”

“I don’t get it,” Myka says.

“Because I’m gonna sink Pete’s battleship. His battleship of an SUV.”

Pete crosses his arms, shakes his head. Yet what he says next confounds Helena: “I’m pretty sure Mattel makes Battleship.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. Who cares? I’ll be the one yelling yahtzee.”

“Yahtzee might be Mattel too,” Pete says.

“Hasbro!” Claudia maintains. “And no matter what game it is, if the winner yells something, that’ll be me, or if the loser yells it, it’s you. Sorry!”

“Parker Brothers,” Pete says darkly. “I bet you that one’s Parker Brothers.”

Helena gives up trying to make sense of it all. “We could escape right now,” she notes to Myka. “They would never notice.”

“We can’t stiff them on the check. That’s just tacky.”

Helena pouts. “We could return the favor _at some other time_.”

“Wouldn’t you rather not have to owe them?”

“I couldn’t say. You’re the one who keeps finding herself in debt for various reasons, some of them more pleasurable than others.” Helena sits back in her chair, resigning herself to listening to more incomprehensibility from Pete and Claudia… but Pete and Claudia have ceased to argue about whatever battleship had sunk the yacht, or vice versa. They are now regarding herself and Myka.

“What _are_ they?” Claudia asks Pete.

“Nerds,” Pete says immediately. This, at least, is unsurprising—even customary. It is so customary that Myka has given up reacting to it at all. He will no doubt at some point find a new word with which to torment her, but for now, it is something close to soothing in its familiarity.

“Not what I meant,” says Claudia. “I mean, they are, but my question is, is the Bering and Wells Show a podcast, with the back-and-forth?”

“Nah. A webseries. You gotta _see_ ’em.”

Claudia considers, then nods. “True. Their this-thing, no-that-thing thing gets boring, sad to say, when you’re listening through the wall.” She pauses. Then she looks up and catches Helena’s very intentionally disapproving eye. “Which I never do.” She pauses again. “Not on purpose, anyway. But when you’re having these little spatlets, yeah. Because loud.”

Helena cannot hold herself back. “‘Little spatlets’ is redundant,” she points out. “Say ‘little spats,’ or simply ‘spatlets.’”

“Say ‘huge pain,’ or simply ‘H.G.,’” Pete mutters.

Myka advises Helena, “Be happy that the spatlets, little or otherwise, are all she hears.”

To which Helena understands she should not respond, but does, “True. The deathlets should be private.”

Hurriedly, and a bit red-facedly, Claudia says, “So yeah _hey_ , how ’bout it, Pete-man? We chase the artifact and see who bags it first: you rolling around this place in your oversize man-can, and me floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee.”

Pete shakes his head. “I’m not doing that. No deal.”

“He’s right,” Myka tells Claudia. “It’s dangerous to try to work alone.”

Pete sags to the side as if he were an adolescent disagreeing with his mother. “Ugh, no, _that’s_ not why not. I’m just pretty sure she’ll cheat.”

“Poor starving starving hippo…” Claudia says—this is some sort of taunt, clearly, for Pete sags further, sighing aggrievedly—“I guess if I cheat, you’ll just have to cheat better, won’t you? I doubt you _can_ , though…”

“No fair! I’m not some Mrs.-Frederic-in-training like you are.”

“Well, I don’t get vibes like you do.”

“Vibes are not cheating!”

“Right, but only if we’re on the same team. Hey, teams! That gives me another idea: you know what we need?”

“Instant replay cameras,” Pete says—fittingly, he says it instantly. “Booth review.”

“We are on the same page, or at least one where the pictures look at lot alike, because here’s what I say: referees.”

“Ooh. That’s another scary idea. But also good.”

They both turn to look at Myka and Helena. In fact they _set down their sandwiches_ , which they have somehow managed to continue eating throughout, in order to look with more intensity.

“Oh no,” Helena says. “I am turning you down flat, and so is Myka. And if she is entertaining any notions to the contrary, I will remind her that she owes me.” She looks Myka straight in the eye. “You owe me, and now I _will_ collect.”

“You don’t have to collect anything, because of course I’m turning them down. Go find your thingy—together, as a team!—yourselves; we’re off the clock.”

“You both owe us already, lunch or no lunch,” Claudia says. “So help out and then you can go get your clock off again.”

“Dirty,” Pete coughs, and Myka reaches across the table and smacks his arm.

Helena feels that the entire holiday situation is slipping from her grasp… that this is beginning to take on a horrifying resemblance to _a normal day at the Warehouse_. “Setting aside considerations of filth, for precisely what do we owe you?”

“We helped convince Artie we’d be able to cover for you so you could have your eight days,” Claudia says.

Myka protests, “We haven’t been on any kind of vacation since Christmas two years ago!”

Claudia nods. “Right. And thanks to us, you’re on one now.”

Helena ignores her and tries to eat salad defiantly. More difficult than one might think, is her conclusion in that matter, given how she is chasing bits of vegetable matter around the plate with completely inadequate cutlery… she snaps back to attention when she hears Myka say, “And the minute the artifact gets neutralized, any and all debts would be cancelled?”

Her salad-based defiance has clearly proved ineffective. “I find myself, horrifyingly, quoting Pete,” Helena says, “‘I’m not doing that. No deal.’ I will also now quote Myka back to herself: ‘of course I’m turning them down.’”

Myka shrugs. “I tried, but wouldn’t you rather not leave the Lattimer-Donovan Collection Agency with an open account? Besides, you know as well as I do that they’re going to do this silly thing, now that they’ve got it in their competitive little heads. And backup is important.” Myka blinks slowly at Helena, whose conditioned response, when Myka blinks like this, is to agree with whatever Myka has just said. Myka _knows_ this. Myka uses this _to her advantage_.

Helena scowls. “Without doubt. Backup _is_ important. Thus you should back Pete up; meanwhile, I will continue on holiday.”

Myka blinks again. “And leave Claudia out there on her own?”

Helena scowls again. “I like you not at all. We are on holiday.”

And now Myka shrugs again. “Busman’s. What a surprise. Did you honestly think we were going to get eight uninterrupted days? Did you honestly think that?”

“Are you using ‘think’ in sense of ‘ideate’ or in the sense of ‘believe’?”

“What do you think?”

“I refuse to enter into some sort of recursive loop that requires my continual querying of your use of the word ‘think.’”

“Well, I refuse to answer questions you already know the answers to.”

“Do you love me?” Helena asks.

She is certainly gratified by the slight uptick of the corners of Myka’s mouth in response to the question, as well as by her actual answer: “Of course I do.”

And thus Helena is _almost_ ashamed of her own triumph, but she declares, “And so you prove yourself a liar.”

“What? I do love you!”

“I didn’t say you didn’t. I do say, however, that you lied about refusing to answer questions I already know the answer to.”

Pete slaps his hands over his ears and shakes his head. “Remind me never to run into the Bering and Wells Show on vacation again.”

Helena stares at him with incredulity. She notes that Myka is doing the same.

“Walked right into that one. Got it.” His tone turns wheedling. “C’mon, Mykes, maybe you’ll even like it. We’ll be riding around town, and you can… look at architecture.”

“You can quit selling. Plus I’m not all that into architecture,” Myka says.

“What are you into? Wait, I know: museums.” He points his index fingers at her. “You can… well, no… how about.. no… well, okay, we’ll probably ride past a museum.”

“I just said quit selling. Besides, ride past? I’d rather be inside a museum,” Myka tells him.

Now Pete claps his hands over _Claudia’s_ ears. He says, in what Helena can only assume is meant to be a stage whisper, “Did you just make the dirtiest and meanest joke about H.G. I ever heard?”

Helena attempts to cover an indelicate snort of disbelief—also hilarity—as Myka knits her brow and say, “Did I… what?”

Removing Pete’s hands from her ears, Claudia says, “I hate when you do that. First, I can hear just about everything through your hands, because guess what, they aren’t walls. Second, I’m not twelve. Third, ew.”

“Here is my dilemma,” Helena says. “Obviously I should take great offense—”

Pete whines, “Why do you always have to—”

“Let me finish! As I was saying, my dilemma is that I _should_ take offense, and yet that _is_ what I would prefer she—”

“What _I_ would prefer,” Myka says as she presses the heels of her hands to her temples, “is to be able to say that this is the most inappropriate me-involving conversation you and Pete have ever had. I really would.”

Claudia philosophizes, “Well, you could say it. It wouldn’t be _true_ , but you could _say_ it.”

“The most inappropriate,” Myka repeats.

“They kind of both are,” Claudia affirms.

Pete offers a fist-bump to Helena. After a moment of consideration, she returns the gesture.

****

“Equipment,” Helena grumbles as she and Myka enter their hotel’s elevator in order to go their room and collect precisely that. Twenty-four floors. The elevator is slow. Helena, initially out of boredom and (she admits internally) petulance, reaches over to Myka’s shirt and undoes its topmost button, the one nearest her neck. When she receives no response at all, she moves closer and tries another. She has moved closer still, and begun a third—it seems to be caught on a thread and is proving more difficult—when Myka says, conversationally, “If this elevator stops and someone else gets on it with us, are you going to be embarrassed?”

Helena shakes her head no. Her head is against Myka’s shoulder, half on her shirt and half on the shoulder that she is beginning to expose—her face meets skin, cloth, skin, cloth, as she moves her head back and forth.

“Am _I_ going to be embarrassed?” Myka asks next.

Helena sighs and rebuttons the two buttons.

“Thank you.”

“I don’t understand how you can participate with such abandon behind a closed door and yet maintain such a _puritanical_ air when—”

“You don’t see how I can make a distinction between public and private.”

Helena shakes her head no again, obstinately. And far less pleasurably.

Myka goes on, “Concepts that are, let’s face it, pretty distinct. This from the woman who made a distinction between ‘spatlets’ and ‘little spatlets’?”

“I did not make such a distinction. I merely pointed out that the latter is redundant.”

“Not if they’re a size down from spatlets.”

“Then Claudia would most likely be unable to hear them,” Helena points out.

“You are ridiculous.”

“I note that you did not say ‘inaccurate.’”

In their room, Helena ransacks her suitcase in search of her Tesla and Farnsworth. Myka, of course, has hers in designated pockets, most likely color-coded in some way… she is equipped and ready to go before Helena has laid hands on either implement. “I don’t see why I have to take them,” Helena complains. “Claudia has hers, and I don’t like to _carry things_.”

Myka chuckles. “I know that, you big baby; isn’t that one of the reasons you’re constantly losing your phone? Make Claudia put your Farnsworth in her bag, and maybe if you sweet-talk her, she’ll take your phone, too. But I’d like it if you kept your hands on your Tesla. And I’d also like it if you didn’t get yourself whammied by whatever artifact we’re chasing.”

“ _We_ are not chasing an artifact. We are _refereeing_ a chase.”

“Still. No whammies. That could really mess up the vacation.”

“The vacation _is_ ‘messed up’! They are stealing a day from us!”

“An afternoon,” Myka says, mildly.

Helena groans, “You have no idea how long this chase will last. Days. Weeks.”

“It won’t take weeks. And we won’t play along for _days_.”

“I know you; I know this look. You are back on the job. You will not send Pete and Claudia on their unrefereed way if this does take more time than your overly optimistic ‘an afternoon.’”

“All the more reason to get moving as soon as possible. And then one of us can win, and it’ll be over, and we can get back to—”

“Wait.”

“Wait what?”

“You said ‘one of us can win.’ But we are not competing.”

Myka smiles a little, and Helena becomes suspicious. “Maybe we should. I mean, I know how you get when you’re motivated. As opposed to just playing along.”

“Oh, and when I am motivated, how do I _get_?” But Myka does know how Helena _gets_ ; she knows very, very well. In many, many circumstances.

Myka doesn’t answer directly. “Here’s what I say: that Pete and I are going to win. No, more than that: we’re going to _beat_ you and Claudia.”

“You are manipulating me.”

“I know. Is it working?”

“If you have to ask, you are not near as au fait with… well, with myself, not so near as you claim.” Helena sighs, and Myka smiles. “But what will I receive when I win? After all, you already owe me.”

Myka’s Farnsworth buzzes; from it, Pete barks, “C’mon! We got details from Steve, I’ve got the car, and Claudia just got an Uber loser on the string. Move it!”

“We’ll work it out later,” Myka tells Helena. “Maybe after _I_ win.”

“Now who’s being ridiculous? Just for that, I won’t try to kiss you in the elevator.”

“Now who’s the liar?” Myka counters. Yes, it is true that Myka knows Helena very, very well.

Five minutes later, Helena and Claudia are standing in front of the hotel.

“This is an inauspicious beginning,” Helena notes.

“We’ll catch up,” Claudia tells her.

“Before today, I had no true basis on which to question your appreciation for reality, but I must point out that we are on a sidewalk, _standing still_ , and Myka and Pete are in a car, _moving_. Rapidly. Away from us. Toward the goal.”

“ _Maybe_ the goal. We still aren’t sure yet; I’m waiting on some more info from Steve. And the car’ll be here in a minute. Relax, Pops.”

“Pops?”

“Father of sci-fi. I’ve been waiting for the right time to drop it on you. You like ‘Daddy-o’ better?”

“No.”

“Pops it is.”

“No.”

“Loosen up.”

“I _was_ loosening up. Then you and Pete intruded.”

“That’s fair. Point to you.”

“Is that point in some way redeemable? Perhaps for my freedom?”

“Sadly, no. Pops.”

“I have always liked you. Admired you, in fact.”

“Aw, thanks.”

“I see now what an error that was.”

“You’ll come back around when we win.”

“Once again I feel compelled to point out: standing still. Versus moving rapidly.”

They continue not moving.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would add my Tumblr tags per usual, but honestly I was mostly just squawking about how scared I was that the 2016 election was going to turn out the wrong way. And surprise, it did! Anyway, the generally unhinged nature of my writing from late 2016 is attributable at least partially to that...


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Tumblr, there was a significant gap between the previous part and this one, and I got an ask about whether I was intending to continue the story. Here's what I said in response: "You asked about Streets, and whether I would continue it. First, yes! Evidence below! Second, though, I’ll say that while it may seem to outside observers that I have abandoned certain stories, believe me when I tell you that nothing is abandoned. I always finish what I start. It may take years, but as long as I manage to avoid being run over by a bus, in a literal or metaphorical sense, I will finish everything." This is still true, just in case anyone was wondering. I then noted, "Previouslies: Myka and Regent!Helena were, surprisingly, on vacation. They were in San Francisco, where Pete and Claudia managed to rope them into refereeing a snag contest based on a mode-of-transportation disagreement. As part 2 ended, Myka and Pete were driving away from Myka and Helena’s hotel. Helena and Claudia were standing outside said hotel, waiting for their Uber to arrive. They are still waiting."

Helena determines that this non-moving little while could be put to some real purpose: she extracts her Farnsworth from her too-small coat pocket. “Put this in your satchel,” she instructs Claudia.

“Okay…”

“And this,” Helena says, handing over her telephone as well.

“Do I look like your butler?”

“Not in the slightest. He was well over seventy, bald as a newborn, and had a pronounced stoop.”

Claudia twists her face. “It’s weird how that was almost a compliment. But I’m still not your butler.”

“And yet between us, there is only one satchel.”

Now Claudia sighs. “Do you want me to hold your Tesla too?”

“I am under strict instructions to keep my hands on my Tesla,” Helena says, doing that. “And I have additionally been instructed to not allow myself to be whammied.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d need to be instructed.”

“I don’t _need_ to be instructed. Well, perhaps about the Tesla, because I would he happy to confer that into your care as well. And yet, regardless of need, I _like_ to be.”

“Aw. Because it means she cares.”

“She does.” That that thought can even now, in an instant, warm Helena’s heart is both absurd and lovely. “And you might wish to bear that in mind, as you drag me into our misadventure, which is, I would like to note, taking its time to commence. Unlike Myka and Pete’s misadventure, which commenced some time ago.”

Claudia begins a scowl, but it transforms into a bright smile as she exclaims, “Hey, the car’s here!” A compact maroon automobile cuts toward the curb in a maneuver that Helena suspects has managed to anger an impressively large number of other motorists, particularly the one who is leaning on his or her horn to express his or her displeasure at currently being blocked by said compact maroon automobile.

“Uber driver!” shouts the motorist with the impressively earsplitting horn, leading Helena to believe that this displeasure is perhaps not an isolated occurrence.

“Your preferred mode of transport seems less than universally popular,” she says to Claudia.

“Dinosaurs. C’mon.”

A slight, young-ish man, whose dark skin is complemented by artfully disheveled hair even blacker and more glossy than Helena’s own, is piloting the compact maroon automobile. Its back seat is even more compact that it appeared it might be… “Smaller on the inside,” Claudia comments. “So, hey, you must be Ramon.”

“Yeah. And you’re Claudia.”

“Do you two know each other?” Helena asks. The young man has an accent of some sort, but she can’t place it.

“It’s how the app works,” Claudia says. “Ramon, my friend, take off. We’re heading for… hang on, I’ll text you the address in a sec. But let’s head north, okay? Go around the block, get on 3rd, and head up.” She is fiddling with her telephone, most likely because she believes that under the semi-public circumstances she should not fiddle with her Farnsworth. But Helena, when using her Farnsworth, has received compliments from several onlookers regarding her “phone,” so the distinction seems one without a significant difference. Then again Claudia can be as careless in public as Pete is, when it comes to making Warehouse business known. Helena supposes she should be glad of a small episode of discretion.

Ramon follows her instructions, angering several more drivers as he abruptly reenters the traffic. Helena resigns herself to the afternoon’s musical accompaniment being electric horns. “So you don’t seem like you’re from around here, man,” he offers to Claudia as he does so. “I mean not just this baking show lady, but you too.”

“Baking show lady?” Helena interjects.

They both ignore her. Claudia tells Ramon, “Maybe that’s because you picked me and H.G. here up outside a hotel. Just a guess.”

“No, you kinda got this weird vibe. Not so West Coast.”

“Vibes are totally cheating,” Claudia pronounces.

“In terms of unfair advantage,” Helena says, “may I remind you that you yourself are psychically connected to…” She raises her eyebrows to convey the significance.

“Yeah, to the Warehouse,” Claudia finishes for her. So much for discretion. “Except for no, not completely. Not yet. And hey, Ramon, if you could keep whatever weird stuff we say to yourself, that’d be great. Capisce?”

Ramon squints at her in the rear-view mirror. “I’m not a native speaker, man. What’d you said there at the end?”

“That would not help you,” Helena informs him. “It is Italian. Slightly bastardized.”

This elicits a “huh” from Claudia, who then says, “I thought it was just old-fashioned slang.”

Helena asks Ramon, “Of what language or languages are you a native speaker? If that is not too intrusive.”

Ramon smiles at her in the mirror. His smile is small—he does not show his teeth—but pleasant. “Thanks for asking. Most people jump to Spanish, ’cause Ramon, but it’s Tagalog. Little Spanish too, but that’s mostly Spagalog. Big Filipino family. Came here when I was seven.”

“Well done,” Helena says.

“Thanks. So when’d you?”

Helena tilts her head. “Ah. When did I come here. Like that. As an immigrant.”

“Unless you just visiting. The hotel and all.”

“No, I… live here.” _How interesting_ , she thinks. She has no plans to live in England again— _would Myka want to?_ —yet she has never once ideated herself as any sort of expatriate. From her original historical time period, yes, but not from her country of origin. “And I have lived her for five years. No, six. Technically I suppose I am a resident alien.”

“And H.G. brings it back to the subject. Smooth,” Claudia says. “You got the address, Ramon? Then step on it.’

Helena says, “I fail to see how we haven’t already lost. They had quite the head start.”

“Steve gave us different ping coordinates than he gave them.”

“That seems an unlevel playing field.”

“Since when did you get all righteous and rule-crazy?”

“Since I am ideally spending four more days with Myka in a hotel room, and hope to spend them with her _not_ resenting me. And vice versa of course.”

“I bet you’d both get over it pretty fast,” says Claudia, with what she clearly believes is a leer. “Anyway, you can take it easy. The pings are supposedly almost exactly the same distance from your hotel.”

“In which I wish I were.”

“Quit complaining. No wonder Myka’s constantly annoyed with you.”

“That is not at all true. She was extremely pleased with me—and _by_ me, I would like to add—before you and Pete so rudely inserted yourselves into our holiday.” Helena produces her own leer. It is far more lascivious than Claudia’s, she is certain.

Claudia waves a hand, apparently reluctant to acknowledge Helena’s superior ability in producing suggestive facial expressions. “In _public_ she’s annoyed. Unavoidable eavesdropping aside, the other business is your business.”

“In public,” Helena repeats. But she considers that Claudia is not wrong: on the latter side of that private/public divide, Myka indeed takes on a veneer of what might be called annoyance… or exasperation… or irritation… “Do I provoke her so very terribly, do you think?” she asks Claudia.

Claudia shakes her head. “I’m not denying that you can be a pain. But my theory is she plays it up to keep her eyes from _actually_ going all googly when she looks at you. Now _your_ eyes, on the other hand… is there such a thing as a brown neon sign? Because those baby browns of yours do nothing but neon-sign ‘smitten,’ then ‘kitten,’ over and over and over.”

“What could that possibly mean,” Helena says. Because she wants to hear the answer. Wants to hear it said aloud.

“You already know, but I’ll say it anyway: either it’s that you can’t help yourself, or you just don’t care who sees how crazy you are about her.”

Now Helena is the one to make a slight noise of speculation. “I don’t suppose I do care,” she says.

“It’s sweet. Mostly. Except when you’re acting way too sensitive about itty-bitty vacation interruptions—and did you see how smooth _I_ just brought us back to the subject? So did you ever get abducted by aliens, H.G.?”

“I feel as if I’m being abducted by an alien right now. Or possibly two—Ramon, have you achieved citizenship? If that is what you wished, of course.” Ramon nods, and Helena cheers him with another “well done.”

Claudia says, “Think, though. What would make someone _believe_ they’d been abducted by aliens?”

“An inadequate grasp of reality. An inappropriate assessment of reality. An incorrect _interpretation_ of reality.”

“Or it might actually _be_ reality. Can’t completely rule that out, right, Pops?”

“They call that genre science _fiction_ for a reason,” Helena points out.

“They call a _lot_ of books ‘fiction,’ and all that happens in most of those is people do stuff and talk. I’ve seen people do stuff and talk, in actual reality. I’ve seen _you_ do stuff and talk. _I’ve_ done stuff and talked. _Today_.”

“Hence you find alien abduction plausible. Your logic, may I say, is somewhat suspect.”

“It’s more plausible, and way less suspect, than a lot of junk that supposedly really happens. Hence aliens, Daddy-o.”

From the front seat, Ramon contributes, “I saw a giant squid one time. It really looked like it might be a alien.”

Helena inhales with alarm. “You have heard us mention someone named Myka,” she says to him.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Should you meet the lady in question, please do me the very large courtesy of refraining from mentioning your squid encounter.” For if Myka is concerned about Helena being affected by an artifact—thus resulting in a negative effect on their remaining holiday—Helena would be similarly concerned about Myka experiencing some tentacle-related trauma, which would most likely result in a far more negative effect on their remaining holiday. For alas, Myka does not easily dismiss traumatic thoughts of tentacles. She in fact tends to recall such thoughts at times that most would consider inappropriate—i.e., at times that such thoughts interrupt _activities_.

Helena considers that she herself may have developed a mild anxiety disorder, one triggered by the mention of tentacles.

Claudia interrupts Helena’s mild anxiety with, “FYI, the lady in question stopped moving.”

“What?”

“They’ve been still for a little while now—well, still-ish—so they must’ve gotten there.” To Helena’s look of confusion, Claudia says, “I’m tracking Pete’s phone.”

“Is _that_ not cheating?”

“How? He could do it back.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“Don’t underestimate the guy who wired that whole Pete-cave,” Claudia cautions. “But Myka’s probably tracking you instead anyway.”

“If she is, it isn’t anything to do with _me_. It’s my telephone.”

“Well, right. But to keep track of you.”

“No, more likely for the telephone. She finds my misplacing it to be irksome. _Genuinely_ irksome; I don’t believe that it is related to any attempt to control the behavior of her eyes.”

“You can’t tell me she isn’t playing ‘Where in the world is H.G.’ when you’re off getting all Regenty.”

Helena sees she will need to explain to Claudia how this all began. She says, “I left my telephone in Jakarta.”

Claudia blinks. Then she says, “I left my wallet in El Segundo.”

Helena hears a snicker from the front seat. Then she hears, also from there, “I gotta get it, I got-gotta get it.” _Then_ she hears a snort-giggle from beside her. She sighs and says, “Be that as it may. She thought that I was stranded there, suffering an… _item’s_ effects. Alternatively, that I was being held, ah, incommunicado. By sinister forces. As I understand it, she threatened one or more persons with physical damage based on their failure to reveal the terrible fate that had befallen me.”

“What had befallen you?”

“I was in Singapore. Lovely city. I sang its praises when next she and I spoke.”

Claudia snorts. “And I bet what happened then was something you don’t want me to call a little spatlet. And I also bet it wasn’t so little anyhow.”

“In any event, she has sworn never again to make any inferences about my own location based solely upon the location of my telephone. When I contact her, she informs me of that location and asks if the telephone and I are in fact together. She is far more calm about my answers than she once was.”

“See, so I was right, now you do have _little_ spatlets. Or littl _er_. Because it’s true, she’s getting more laid-back about… stuff. Some stuff. Which is a good, because it’s also true that if she freaked out every time you did something new and differently weird—because let’s face it, you do a lot of new and differently weird somethings—we’d have to medicate her.”

“Do not do that. I like Myka as she is, whatever ‘freaking out’ may come. But also I have made a concerted attempt to reduce the number of new and differently weird somethings with which I confront her.”

“Keep it simple, stupid,” Claudia says.

Helena nods. “Pete has used that locution on me, so I understand that you are not conveying the insult I assumed he was. Fortunately, he explained before I tried to retaliate.” Claudia gulps at the mention of retaliation, and Helena smiles. “I have also attempted to reduce my inclination to retaliate. But further, yes, I am learning, in many arenas, to keep it—whatever ‘it’ is, in the arena under review—simple.”

And the more intimate, the more simple: though that learning had at first seemed that it might take form of a hard landing. She and Myka had hardly been together, as a couple, a particularly substantial length of time—they had hardly been together, as a physically intimate couple, a particularly substantial _number_ of times—when, in the middle of what Helena was working with diligence to make the best physically intimate time yet (better every time, different and better, that was her determined goal), Myka stilled Helena’s very busy hands and mouth. She moved a slight distance away, so that they lay very close, but markedly apart. And then Myka said, or rather implored, “Will you _please_ stop trying so hard! I’m sorry, but I just don’t—look, I can’t keep up. It’s like you want to prove something to me every single time, and I don’t even know what it is. And whatever it is, you don’t have to. Unless—” She stopped talking.

Helena waited, but no more words emerged. She and Myka breathed across the distance, onto each other’s skin. When Helena felt her own skin begin to cool, she asked, “Unless what?”

“Unless—are you trying to keep _yourself_ interested?”

“What? No! I mean, yes, of course, but no, I want to make sure that you. What I mean is, I thought you would want.” She cleared her throat. “Not rote.”

“You thought I would want not rote,” Myka repeated.

“Correct.”

“I think there’s a world of difference between ‘not rote’ and ‘now we have to turn to page 42 of the manual and do that one because it’s next on the list and we haven’t done it yet.’ Because that’s what it feels like.” Helena wondered if she was perhaps expected to laugh, but Myka went on, “Though I don’t know. I’ve never been with anybody long enough for anything to seem rote in the first place.”

“I would say ‘nor have I,’ for I understand what you mean, but that would be inaccurate. A relationship need not be of notably long duration for its physical aspect to become… tedious.”

“So why can’t we just do what feels right in any given moment?”

“That is, if you will forgive me, absurd. Physical intimacy is a _most_ strategic undertaking. Any given moment generally involves preparation for the _next_ moment.”

Myka said, in a tone that she usually reserved for public admonishments regarding nonsense, “I _meant_ , as long as it feels right instead of tedious.”

“Oh. Well.” Helena cleared her throat again— _uncharacteristic_ , she admonished herself, and _why are you unsettled by this?_ she asked herself. “Also, I have read that for the average couple, any approach that has not been attempted in the early, intense phase of their relationship, they are unlikely ever to try.”

“I’m actually okay with it if our repertoire isn’t… vast. If it isn’t the _most_ vast. And why can’t we be something other than average in terms of what we do when? I mean it’s not like we fall in the middle of the bell curve when it comes to anything else. Also: where did you read this? _When_ did you read this?”

“On the Internet. Some weeks ago.”

“Okay. _Why_ did you read this?”

“For research purposes.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask, but… what were you researching?”

“Relationships. How they might be ideally conducted.” The existence of a felt need for help in that matter was an admission Helena had never imagined she would volunteer, so she tried to make light of it: “Do you know, a veritable industry of advice surrounds that question.”

“I kind of do know that. I might have consulted some of it myself. Maybe even for the same reason you did.” And then Helena was very glad of that reason, for Myka moved closer, and they softened into a kiss.

But the discussion was not really over, so once the kiss ended—and its end indicated that the discussion should indeed continue—Helena asked, “And what did _you_ learn?”

“That we both probably need a lot of therapy. Most of it for things that have nothing to do with.” Myka sighed. “Sex. I really hoped this could be the easy part.”

“It is not _easy_ ,” Helena said. “It is _strategic_.” She had not intended the words to emerge as such a petulant whine… or perhaps she had intended that after all. For if Myka was so very _dissatisfied_ with everything, if she did not even respect that Helena cared to _consider the next moment_ , then what could possibly be the reason to—

“Look,” Myka said, stopping Helena’s sulk. “I’m not telling you how to think… during. It. You want to strategize? Art-of-War your heart out. But you told me what you assumed I wanted, and I’m telling you that your assumption wasn’t valid.”

Helena crossed her arms over her chest. “It might have been.”

“It might have. But you would’ve known for certain if you’d thought about checking with me. You know, the person you were making the assumption _about_.”

“You were right,” Helena admitted, “when you said I wanted to prove something. Several somethings, in fact.”

“There’s nothing to prove. Rote or not rote, that doesn’t matter. I don’t care if it’s new every time; I don’t even care if it’s _good_ every time. I care that it’s you.” She shrugged her shoulders—or, no, she began a shrug, but her shoulders stayed high and tense, near her ears. “Even if you’re a little confused about the difference between sex and three-dimensional chess.”

Helena laughed. “They are both three-dimensional,” she pointed out. “But I will concede that there may be salient dissimilarities.”

Myka exhaled, and her shoulders descended. “Then I think you should come over here and figure them out.” Now she laughed. “Or pretend they’re the same thing. Whatever you want.”

“ _Whatever_ I want?” Helena began to move very near again to Myka.

She moved so near, in fact, that she felt Myka’s smile, when it began to curve, against her own mouth, and even more as Myka said, “I was going to tack on a ‘within reason’ to that, but you know what? Yeah. Whatever you want. Just don’t try so hard.”

“And yet what if that is what I want? To try very, very hard to please you in ways you have never been pleased before?” But those questions were nothing but braggadocious teases. Helena had known then, and she knows now, that regardless of what might appear on all the pages of that metaphorical manual, she would be just fine without all of it. She knows too that the younger versions of herself would find such a conclusion unexpected—those versions had wanted so _much_ , so _many_ —but what she wants now are only time, only peace, and only one lover, this lover, with whom to share these simpler, yet superior, things.

Myka had smiled yet again, and that smile said _I know_. Then she said, aloud, “You do please me in ways that I’ve never been pleased before. You. Just you.”

And since the reverse was also true… “I love you,” Helena had said. She had never said it like that, unadorned and unmistakable, to Myka. Nor, for such a very long time, to anyone at all.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Helena echoed. What would come next?

What came next was that Myka kissed her, hard and quick, then said, “ _That’s_ what I want. And you understand why, right?”

“I have hopes,” Helena said, but as with the unmistakable three, unadorned. No carapace of conceit.

And then Myka said those unmistakable words back to her, fine and simple and true.

Keep it simple, stupid. Myka is, as far as Helena knows, the only person among the Warehouse family who would be unlikely to say _those_ words directly to her. (Helena is surprised that Mrs. Frederic has not yet seen fit to say them.) And yet it is only for Myka that she would ever make such a genuine effort.

Now, however, she is making a genuine effort to refrain from tesla-ing Claudia, who is tugging on her arm, pointing out the window, and shouting, “That guy has a really flashy flashlight! And this is really close to where the ping was! Turn around, Ramon; we gotta find him! Got-gotta find him! H.G., are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That the torch will come in handy when night falls, as it will soon? Or if he should happen to find himself in a poorly lit, enclosed space?”

“Alien abduction, H.G. Put that together with a flashlight shining through the fog, and what comes to mind?”

“An _illuminated_ alien abduction?” Helena guesses.

Claudia groans. “God, that’s right, you don’t know what X Files is. Because we haven’t gotten there yet in your pop-culture lessons.”

“Film? Television program? Or perhaps Broadway musical? The latter do seem all the rage.”

“It’s the first two. Not a Broadway musical, but I just might pay Hamilton money to see X Files: The Musical. I just might. I can practically hear its big first-act ender, ‘I Want to Believe’… yeah. And there’d be some big love duet that pretends like it’s not actually a love duet, like you and Myka and your whole ‘the price is too high’ deal.” She focuses her gaze out the window, yelps at Ramon to turn left, then continues, “Actually, I think that’s the song that ends the second act in our big Warehouse musical. And of course Jinksy and me, we kill it with our ‘Never Had a BFFWYLION Like Me’ number.”

“You’ve consumed a mind-altering substance, I’m certain,” Helena tells her. “Please let me know when its effects wane.”

Ramon says, “I wanna hear this BFFWY… whatever number.”

“You bet you do,” Claudia says.

“It is an initialism,” Helena informs him. “One that is as inane as all such are.”

Claudia says, “Isn’t it an acronym? Anyway, I think he gets that. Ramon’s down with O.P.P., am I right?”

Ramon snickers just as he did earlier. He says, “Yeah, you know me,” at which Claudia, for her part, snort-giggles again. “I get the BFF part,” he says, as he responds, quite calmly, to another shouted “turn here!” once the giggle subsides. “I guess I gotta hear the song to get the rest of it. That’s good, though, man; I like musicals. That’s from my mom. And big bro was a battle DJ. Musicals and rap taught me English—wasn’t saying it right, I thought, if it didn’t got a rhythm. Like that was proper English.”

“That should totally be true!” Claudia crows. “Ramon, you are my brother from another mother. Or father. Or maybe from the same mother or father; I don’t know all that much about my family history tbh.”

“Initialisms,” Helena mutters. “But _also_ acronyms: that hideous ‘scuba’ word.”

“You can have a song about how they’re destroying the language. Wait, can you even sing? Never mind; Broadway-H.G.’ll be able to. We’ll get Idina Menzel.”

“Now you are uttering nonsense syllables,” Helena proclaims.

Claudia shakes her head: “No, ‘Adele Dazeem’ is nonsense syllables. I see that Steve and I are gonna have to dig in and really Broadway-school you.”

Prompted by the idea of digging, Helena paws through Claudia’s satchel for her Farnsworth. She calls Myka. “Please rescue me,” she says when she sees that blessed face smiling back at her from the screen. “I will owe you everything.”

Claudia scoffs, “You always already say you owe her everything.”

“My dear sweet love,” Helena tells the face that, its owner having heard Claudia’s comment, is now smiling even more widely, “I will owe you everything raised to a power of your choosing if you will get me out of this.”

Myka laughs. “Oh no. You got us into it.”

“How _in the world_ did I get us into it?”

A tinny laugh once again emerges from the Farnsworth. “You didn’t. But I was hoping you might forget, since of course I won’t. And exactly how do you propose I get you out of it from here, anyway?”

“We will leap out of our respective vehicles,” Helena begins.

“That would probably hurt. Besides, I’m not in my vehicle.”

“I am,” Helena says. “And it _would_ most likely hurt. However, here is my current proposal: I will leap and bravely bear the pain, you will make your escape however you wish, and then we will meet at the hotel. Then, perhaps, you could dress my wounds. Or undress them?”

Claudia takes her eyes off the street long enough to give Helena a look of great skepticism. “Are you trying to make the idea of flinging yourself from a moving car sound sexy?”

“Only the aftermath. And only if Myka agrees.”

Yet another Farnsworth-mediated laugh: their repeated incidence is making Helena think that Myka is not, in fact, fully in “agent” mode, hotel-room-exiting attitude aside. Myka says, in a voice that indeed does not sound official at all, “You might have a weird idea or two about what’s sexy. But I—”

Claudia shouts, alarmingly close to Helena’s ear, “Anyway we’re about to snagbagtag it, so it won’t matter!” She smacks Helena’s Farnsworth closed—before Helena even can say a brief goodbye—and entreats Ramon to pull over “and wait for us, because we’re gonna be heading out in just a second to _lord it over_ some losers.”

Helena sighs and follows her from the car.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 3 tumblr tags: I know I know I know, and I would give you all the reasons why I'm so very snail's-pace these days, but everybody has responsibilities that demand time and brain space, so what I'll say is I try to make things as right as I can, and nothing's ever perfect (sadly), but I want to not be lazy, to be just as diligent here as I am with words I'm paid to write, and if it takes nine dialogue passes, I want to do those nine, and then a tenth, that is the end of my excuses, (although dialogue is never not a bear to wrangle), Anyway I recommend rewinding history back for a little bit of A Tribe Called Quest, also those Filipino (and Filipina!) DJs from the Bay Area in the '80s and '90s were not messing around


	4. Chapter 4

Obtaining the implement from the gentleman holding it is quite easy—Claudia gives him two twenty-dollar bills, and he does not bother to look twice at her purple-gloved hands as he surrenders the prize. Claudia, for her part, does not bother to look twice at his high-speed scamper away as she drops the torch into a static bag, shouting, “Ha! We win!”

Nothing happens.

Helena pats her on the shoulder. “A lesson in the inadvisability of drawing conclusions based on insufficient evidence. You were so enamored of your Former Files idea.”

Claudia utters a confused “what?”, but then her expression clears. “No, it’s not Ex-Files like ex- _husband_ ,” she says. “It’s X-Files like X- _ray_.”

“Your Roentgen Files idea, then.”

“Well if it wasn’t that guy with the flashlight, then I don’t get it. Somebody just showed up all random and did some abducting? What’s here?”

“Buildings. Sidewalks. Roads. Many, many automobiles, all the drivers of which Ramon has angered. No offense intended, Ramon.”

“Least I ain’t a tourist, man. No offense intended.” He smiles his small smile at Helena, and she smiles back. He goes on, “So we done? If it was a great ride, five stars much appreciated. You guys get five too, just for the entertainment.”

Claudia asks him, “Do you mind hanging out for just a minute while we… scout around? I don’t know where else we’ll need to go.”

Ramon considers for a moment; then he shrugs. “My day off from my real job. So you keep paying me, saves me having to cruise around. You know, _angering_ people.”

Helena laughs. “So we will be paying you to lower the city’s average blood pressure. Money no doubt well spent. But Claudia, public health benefits aside, this is striking me as very similar to hiring a car _and_ driver. Whereas under Pete’s transportation regime, no one compensates him for the labor of driving.”

“Shut up,” Claudia says. “Ramon _gets_ us.”

Helena notes, “Ramon gets money.” Ramon nods. “And of course a rating of several stars.”

He nods again and says, “Plus a little vape right now. Take your time, man.”

They inquire at nearby establishments; no one has seen anything strange. Or they have all grown so accustomed to the vagaries of the human condition that they have trained themselves to overlook anything not immediately harmful.

A convenience-store cashier notes that “anyway, weirdos are nicer than normals.”

At that, Claudia high-fives the cashier. She then turns to do the same to Helena—who does not raise her arm in response, so Claudia folds her flat, upraised hand into a fist and chucks Helena under the chin. “You do you, Pops,” she says.

She can indeed be quite charming, Claudia can.

Claudia turns back to the cashier: “So nevermind the weirdos. Seen anybody get abducted by aliens?”

“Yeah,” says the young lady. She reports it as banal news, but Claudia _leaps_ halfway across the counter at the poor thing, whose eyes widen in non-banal alarm. Helena grabs Claudia’s collar and pulls her back down. “Abducted, you say?” she asks, attempting to match the weary tone, while Claudia makes squeaking noises that sound suspiciously close to “ _Now_ we win!”

The cashier shrugs. “I mean some guy staggers in and _says_ he was. Probably just high. He bought sunglasses—the alien lights, way too bright. He said.”

Helena says to Claudia, and she means it as a tease, “An _illuminated_ abduction. Yet another lesson in why it is best to avoid premature conclusions.”

“And gluten-free pretzels,” the cashier volunteers. “Two bags.”

Claudia says, “Maybe the aliens experimented on his digestion.”

“Surely his condition predated the abduction,” Helena says. “To what purpose would any aliens deprive anyone of the ability to process prolamins and glutelins?”

“How can you know exactly what gluten is but not X-Files?”

Helena huffs. “How can you know the things you know and yet imagine that sensitivity to particular proteins is a recent development? Consider my friend Dr. Samuel Gee. My late friend, that is, given that I knew him in the… past. He was the pediatrician who… well. He was an important figure, at any rate, and an area of particular interest for him was coeliac disease. We spoke of it on occasion. I was interested to discover if he, or anyone, had made further progress, in my… absence.” She has cleared her throat several times during this recitation. She feels that her eyes may be reddening. She should never have mentioned such a part of the past, not here, not now; there are things she speaks of only to her therapist and to Myka, for these things make her _think_ , and that is not productive, for now she will be thinking of—

The cashier asks, “Are _you_ high?”

Helena clears her throat again. “Alas, no. Quite low in fact.”

Claudia says, “She means are you on dr—”

This attempt at a helpful definitional interjection does have the effect of sending Helena toward nostalgic amusement rather than… well. “Claudia darling,” she says, “do I truly strike you as someone who does not understand the concept—or pleasures—of being under the influence of substances?”

“That’s right, you were a wild one, weren’t you? Artie hates that. He muttered ‘opium eater’ about you once when he didn’t know I was there—I was practicing my Mrs. F poof-ins.”

“Are you improving?” For Claudia has expressed great frustration at not yet being fully able to surprise her colleagues into shrieking and dropping whatever they might be holding.

“ _No_. Batting less than .300. Like I get the _theory_ , but all that usually happens is that I stand there and feel like I _might_ go somewhere. Like I’m waiting for a bus that never comes.” She brightens. “But it worked that time with Artie. So did you really do that?”

Helena had hoped Claudia would forget her query. “What is the better answer here?” she queries back.

“Tell the truth. Otherwise I’ll just ask you again in front of Steve.”

“If I refuse to answer, he can discern nothing.”

“That just means the answer’s yes. I may not have been born over a hundred years ago, like _some_ people, but I wasn’t born yesterday either.”

The cashier mutters, “ _Both_ high…”

Back on the sidewalk, Claudia is the picture of pique crossed with consternation. “So here’s what I say we do now,” she says. “We go find Myka and Pete. Steve didn’t say whose ping happened later, so maybe they’ve got the actual good spot and we can swoop in and get the snag.”

“Investigation is truly not your calling, is it,” Helena remarks as they reenter the minuscule maroon back seat. It is coming to feel quite homey.

“Guess not. My destiny’s written in the stars. Or the aisles of the Warehouse, so woo hoo! Lucky me.”

“Fortunately, my own destiny at the moment is to act solely as a referee. You could employ best practices, if you wished to, but I’m not responsible for insisting that you do so.” So much for competition, she thinks, but then she reconsiders. “Although I suppose preempting Pete and Myka might indeed be _a_ path to victory.”

“I knew it! You do want to win!”

“Well, given the _choice_. Then again, my investment in Myka’s happiness is ongoing. Perhaps I’ve been sabotaging you the entire time.”

“I don’t buy it. You’re too competitive. I know how you get.”

Helena sees that she will need to modify how she _gets_. If only so no one will use that expression about her again. She proposes,“Or perhaps it is simply that I want to see Myka. Because we have been apart for nearly four hours, and I miss her.”

“You might be yanking my chain on that—but I doubt it. You’re such a schmoop. I can’t believe I used to think you were this smooth player.” She pauses, as if she expects Helena to object. “At least we know they haven’t won yet. Otherwise Pete’d be gloating.”

“You of course would never stoop so low.”

“Are you kidding? My gloats _limbo_ under everybody else’s.”

Helena sighs. “Would that you were speaking of the holding space for those who have died in friendship with God but prior to Christ’s resurrection.”

“Hey, most people just talk about it being for babies,” Ramon says. “Or they used to, before the Pope said we don’t believe in any those limbos anymore. You Catholic, H.G.?”

“Just overeducated, I’m afraid. For example, Islam has a similar site, or rather concept, known as barzakh.”

Claudia snorts. “I like how you think showing off whatever esoteric whatever makes up for your sad lack of smooth play, but let Ramon concentrate on driving and not some Islamic bar.”

“Limbo,” Helena corrects her.

“I can’t. I’m in a car.”

Ramon chortles. Helena sighs again and consoles herself with the prospect of soon seeing Myka.

She is pleased out of all proportion when they pull to the curb near where Claudia has located Pete’s telephone: because there Myka _is_ , with her hair and her eyes and her sweet, sweet self. And then Myka sees that Helena has emerged from the absurdly small maroon vehicle, and her expression makes clear that Helena has—and possibly they both have—already won the prize most worth winning. “Hello, my love,” Helena says, and she kisses Myka, but quickly, on the cheek, so as to give no cause for embarrassment.

It works; Myka responds with bemusement rather than upset. “Aren’t we competing?” she asks, but she is smiling. “By the way.”

“I don’t see how that alters my love for you. By the way. And also by the way, I am aware of no rules prohibiting osculation between competitors.”

Pete rolls his eyes. “There should be a rule against not saying ‘making out’ when you mean ‘making out.’”

“We aren’t ‘making out,’” Myka tells him. “Mostly because we aren’t teenagers, but also because we _aren’t_.” As if to prove her point, she kisses Helena’s cheek—but her lips linger for an extra second, soft on soft. Yet another prize.

“Ahem. No rules prohibiting osculation, chaste or otherwise,” Helena notes. “I am in fact aware of no rules at all. Whenever I imagine I discern some vague legal boundary, Claudia assures me that I am mistaken.”

Myka says, with completely inappropriate, but quite welcome, affection, “Like you’d know a legal boundary if you tripped over it.”

“Bet you could limbo under it, right, H.G.?” Claudia chirps.

“That seems more your preferred option.”

Ramon says, “We talking options, I pick that Islamic bar.”

Myka, smiling a degree less brightly, looks among the three of them. “I think your car’s having more fun than mine is.”

“That can _hardly_ come as a surprise,” Helena says, and barely a second elapses before the easy-to-predict squawk of “Hey! I’m fun!” from Pete.

“Today you’re not,” Myka says. “Today you’re all weird and mopey.”

“That’s because we haven’t had a car chase, and _I want one_.”

Myka says, “Why don’t you go drive around really fast for a while—”

“That isn’t a _chase_!”

Myka continues, “And I’ll stay here with Helena and Claudia and… I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Ramon. So wait, if you’re Myka—”

“Yes?”

“You’re the lady in question. The one I’m not supposed to tell this thing to.” He turns to Helena. “Right?”

Helena nods, but then Myka asks “What thing?” in a tone that Helena belatedly realizes is the one she uses when she wishes to compel an answer—

—and indeed, Ramon begins, “This one time I saw—”

“No!” Helena exclaims. She moves to place her hands over Myka’s ears, but before she can reach Myka—and, fortunately, before Ramon can finish his utterance—four Farnsworths buzz. What Ramon says instead is “Those are some _phones_ , man.”

As it happens, Steve has yet more artifact activity to report to all of them, this time at an entirely different location. Helena and Claudia move to reenter Ramon’s car, and Ramon moves quickly too, but Pete moves with more motivation than anyone. Helena and Claudia are in the small back seat, listening through the Farnsworth to Myka complaining that he’s started moving before she could get her legs all the way in the car and close the door, when he shouts, very clearly intended for Helena and Claudia’s consumption, “Did you hear me click my seatbelt? So long, suckers!”

“Ramon!” Claudia calls out, “I never thought I’d say this, not in my whole life, but: follow that car!”

“Follow that car?” Ramon repeats. “But he’s speeding.”

Helena tells him, “We are law enforcement. It is completely legal.”

“Prove it.”

Helena shows him her Secret Service badge.

“It looks real,” Ramon says.

“Due to the fact that it _is_ real.”

“Whatever. Will it fool the cops?”

“I do not _need_ to _fool_ them.”

“You kinda do,” Claudia says.

“You are not helping,” Helena informs her. “I thought you were interested in _winning_.”

“What _is_ this game anyway, man?” Ramon asks.

“Uh…” Claudia scrambles, “scavenger hunt. Sorta. For the IRS. Looking for people who… evade taxes.”

Ramon, wise young man that he is, is clearly unpersuaded. “By getting abducted by aliens?”

Claudia says, “That makes a weird kind of sense—how do you file your 1040 from the alien mothership?—so I’ll go with yeah. Exactly.” To Helena, though, she says, “Wait, if you can hang onto a wallet with a badge, why can’t you handle your other junk?”

“Women’s garments have too few pockets,” Helena tells her. “Too few, and too small.”

“ _Carry a bag_.”

“I don’t like to _carry things_.”

“I remember a time you were _happy_ to carry that big-ass grappler around.”

“That was primarily to impress Myka.”

“Though I guess you did dump it on her as soon as you could… waitaminute, you _admit_ it was to impress her?”

“Of course I do. Was there some question?”

Claudia’s jaw drops. “ _Bets_ have been placed. On that and lots of other you-n-Myka stuff. I thought I told you that.”

“I strive to forget many, many things. But here is something _you_ might want to remember. It is a tip, regarding any future wagers you may place.”

“Okay…”

“If the wager concerns my motivation? Take the Myka-related side.”

“Now that you say it, that does seem like a no-brainer. Though nobody knew that for sure back in the grappler-day. You might’ve been just a bad guy.”

“You should have known it for certain. I may have been ‘a bad guy,’ but whatever it was you said that my eyes do now, they have done exactly that since first I saw her.” That was an admission she had not necessarily intended to make… but fortunately Claudia’s face has not reacted. She hurries on, “In any case, given my very helpful advice, I’ll expect to receive a reasonable percentage of your winnings.”

“You’re still pretty much a bad guy, aren’t you,” Claudia says, but with good humor.

“Would it help if I say that I would use my portion of the take to increase Myka’s happiness?”

“Maybe. How?”

“I might give her flowers. As it happens, Myka is strangely sentimental about flowers.”

“That does sound a little strange. For Myka. How’d you figure that out?”

“I gave her flowers.”

“Aw, and she liked them?”

“She threw them at me.”

Ramon laughs.

Claudia shakes her head. “I never know what kind of story it’s gonna be with you guys. So what happened? Did you talk her into liking them?”

“No. I talked her back into liking _me_ , a campaign the flowers were originally intended to support. And once that campaign was to a certain extent successful, she directed her attention to the flowers littered around me. And she was appalled.”

“At them.”

“No, at herself. For what she had done to them.” Claudia is looking askance at her, so Helena concludes, “And that is the story of how I came to learn that Myka is strangely sentimental about flowers.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve got my head around what’s strange in this story, and trust me, it’s not Myka. All I can say is, thank god you’re not _my_ life partner.”

“And yet in a way I am, o eventual Caretaker. You are, as I believe is said, stuck with me.”

Ramon says, “Maybe you _are_ West Coasty like that. Sounds like a pretty alternative lifestyle to me.”

“You have no—” Claudia begins to tell him, but she is thrown against the side of the car has he accelerates around a corner. “Idea,” she finishes.

Ramon is keeping excellent pace with Pete, who is _flying_ , practically, through the streets. “What does ‘dirty Harry’ mean to you?” Claudia asks Helena.

“Dirty Harry.” She considers. “It might be the name of an unpalatable cocktail.”

“It’s a movie. And a guy in the movie. Lots of movies, like four or five.”

“How does that preclude the previous?”

“And yet another point to you.”

“Yet another unredeemable point. I am replete.”

“And then there’s Bullitt.”

Ramon says, “That’s my favorite.”

“A slightly more palatable cocktail?” Helena tries.

“Also a movie,” Claudia says. “And a guy in the movie. My point is, I bet Pete’s bringing them up too.”

“And you are for some reason required to bring up the same topics Pete does? Is this part of leveling the playing field?”

“I think they’re part of why Pete’s got San Francisco car chases on the brain. Probably why he wanted to get us into one.”

On Taylor Street, they become literally airborne. “This really is just like in _Bullitt_!” Claudia squeals as they depart from, then thud with solidity back to, earth. She is the only one in the car who seems pleased.

“I’m gonna need new shocks,” Ramon notes. “You guys paying for that?”

“I’ll talk to my boss,” Claudia tells him. “And he’ll say no, and then I’ll go over his head. But come on, you said it was your favorite!”

“Not to drive like somebody _in it_. Never said it was my _car’s_ favorite.”

Helena asks Claudia, “Did your analysis of the superiority of your preferred transportation include budgeting for repairs?”

At that moment, Pete’s vehicle launches itself off the top of the next hill; they watch it land with great force. Then they watch as its muffler drops, then drags against the pavement, creating impressive sparks.

Claudia says, dryly, “Pete better factor it in too.”

When they arrive at the new site, Pete and Myka are of course already there and have exited their large vehicle. As Helena and Claudia are prying themselves from Ramon’s car, Pete points at them and exclaims, “Ha! I won!”

Claudia looks pointedly at his hands, which are empty. “Oh yeah? Then where’s the artifact?”

“Not that, loser. You didn’t _catch me_. In the _chase_.”

“That’s only because _Bullitt_ isn’t Ramon’s car’s favorite movie,” Claudia tells him. Ramon, who is now standing behind her, crosses his arms and nods. They look like two small park rangers sternly confronting a baffled bear.

Helena looks at Myka, who sighs and shakes her head. Helena considers grabbing her and commandeering both Ramon’s movie-disliking car and his services. “To the hotel!” she imagines directing him. She additionally imagines, however, that Myka would insist that Ramon turn the car around so as to make sure Pete and Claudia are not getting themselves into unrefereed trouble.

So the faster they solve the artifactual problem… Helena casts her gaze around the area. What she might see that would be revealing, she has no idea. She does suppose that if someone had been abducted from this spot by aliens a short time ago, the aliens would be gone by now, having absconded with their abductee. Surreptitious person-snatching aliens were not what she herself had envisioned—extraplanetary populations had seemed far more likely to invade and plunder—but she now supposes there might be as many different types of aliens as, not quite literally, stars in the sky.

She supposes too that she should be pleased that she can in fact _see_ , as she glances about. Although night is falling, the vicinity is well lit. A streetlamp looms above her, sheathing her in the shine of its high-intensity bluish beam. If an alien abduction had occurred here, it would indeed have been _extremely_ illuminated. She opens her mouth to tease Claudia again, but before she can utter a word, an idea strikes her.

Bright alien lights. Sunglasses, and the need for them.

She is curious. She looks up, directly up, into the streetlight.

Have her feet left the ground? A physical disorientation has overtaken her— _I am not where I am; I am not where I was; I am not **as** I was_, she thinks, and she might have said it aloud, but if her physical body is no identifiable where, and no identifiable thing, how could it, being nowhere and nothing, say anything at all?—and after a span of time that she cannot pin down, she is once again standing on a street. Under a streetlight… she sees the street, and she sees that it is lit, so nothing has happened to her eyes. She hears traffic behind her. She reaches to touch the light pole, and feels it solid under her fingers: she is no hologram. “Myka?” she says, and she is relieved to find that nothing has happened to her voice—but Myka does not answer. Nor Claudia, nor Pete. Pedestrians step around her, heedless of her bewilderment.

Helena looks for a street sign, and there she finds a plausible reason for Myka, Pete, and Claudia’s absence: this is a different road entirely. Presumably still San Francisco, but would she know if it were not? The cars look similar to those she has recently seen, so significant time travel has most likely not occurred.

She considers what to do. Of course she has neither telephone nor Farnsworth… this is her own fault.

Myka is going to be _most displeased._

TBC

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 4 tumblr tags: I am thinking that H.G. needs some new business cards, which will read, 'Helena Wells: Taker of Ill-Advised Actions', alternatively we can just safety-pin a note to her, and it will say, 'If found please return to Myka Bering'


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, mostly talking. Only a little bit of driving around. Maybe a spoonful of philosophy, thought out not at all well. But it’s a story, anyway. One that concludes here, after having variously raced and meandered through the previous parts.

Helena remains disoriented, but she admonishes herself to ignore that sensation, to set herself to _gathering data_. Passersby will know the where and the when of the situation, so she steadies herself and turns to the person nearest her.

But in doing so, she encounters something she did not expect: a familiar face. Ramon is now standing in precisely the spot she had a moment ago occupied. “Where are we?” he asks, looking around just as Helena had. “I got lost. I think—I mean it musta been a—” and then he says a word that Helena does not know: teak-BALL-ang, he seems to have said, but for all her overeducation she cannot connect that to anything she knows.

“ _What_ must it have been?” she asks. She is relieved to be able to focus her attention on him.

“Tikbalang. Big guy with horse feet, horse head. Had to be one, _had to_. Thought it was just stories, like my mom told, how they like to mess with you, at night in the forest, get you lost. But he did it, he got me lost… is the rest of it true too?”

Focus. Continue to focus. “What is the rest of it?” she manages to ask him.

“Sometimes, when the moon’s bright… then, if you can ride them, they can take you between worlds.”

Nothing of what Ramon is saying resembles her own experience in any way, but she, too, can feel her mind straining to make sense of what has just occurred…. seeking an explanation. What it _had to_ have been. Of course the human brain does want to understand what befalls the body, and of course that brain is perfectly happy to make up a story to account for any anomalous event. Helena tries to hold to the side that compulsion to rationalize—and she is having to concentrate mightily in order to do so—as she considers whether she might be able to reverse this, whatever _this_ is… she shakes her head, hard, and that is enough to make her once again conscious of what she had done just as _this_ happened: she had looked up, directly into the streetlight.

“When the moon is bright, you say… Ramon, will you trust me?”

“To what?” His look suggests that he is indeed quite lost, that he might wander away, telling himself over and over what this must have been. What _had to_ have caused this anomalous state of affairs.

She says, “I want to repeat an experiment.” She takes hold of his hand. “Look up. Up into that bright, bright light.”

Once again a dazzle of disorientation, a paradoxical nothingness of strange, fast movement, no control, surrendering control, and she realizes—it all at once makes sense—this is the direct opposite of the Bronze, with its unrelenting dark and enforced _lack_ of movement… if the Bronze was the unnatural preservation of life, then is this its natural end? Yes, that must be it: she has reached the end. It is over. Her acceptance of that as dispositive fact affords her an uncanny, yet not unwelcome, peace.

And then she is standing on another street corner— _yet_ another street corner?—and she is alive. Alive, after having been dead. Again, dispositive fact. And yet…

From behind her, she hears Myka’s voice: “Helena!”

Pete’s: “See, she’s okay. She’s here and she’s okay.”

And Claudia’s: “Ohmygod H.G.! Ohmygod Ramon! Were you actually abducted by aliens?”

“Actually, no,” Helena says.

Ramon agrees, “Not unless they’re from Mindanao. But that was _awesome_!” Helena pulls him away from the streetlight to keep him from trying it again, regardless of awesomeness. Though he does seem perfectly happy, now, to marvel at what he believes he has experienced.

Claudia says, “So wait, does that mean there’s something else? Some totally different artifact?”

“I’ve no idea,” Helena says. “But I believe we may safely say there is more than one.”

“More than one,” Pete says. He is leaning is head a bit to the side, rubbing a thumb against his jaw: thinking.

“Working together,” Helena tells him.

“What,” Myka says, and she has got her voice under very tight control, “Happened. To. You.”

Claudia murmurs, “Hey, H.G., look at her eyes.”

Helena does so, and Myka blinks at her, then squints. “Indeed,” Helena says, “‘googly’ is not the word. But I suspect she is not playing it up.”

“Playing what up?” Myka demands. “You disappeared. Are you surprised that I found that a little worrying?”

“And annoying?” Helena asks. At this, Myka inhales in a way that conveys “not out of the question.”

“Like I said,” Claudia notes.

“I did not do it intentionally,” Helena tells Myka.

Myka says, “That doesn’t help. Because what did I tell you? What did I explicitly tell you, using words?”

“Don’t get whammied.”

“And what did you do?”

“The obverse of that. However, I did keep my hands on my Tesla.”

“That doesn’t help either. Honestly, Helena, what happened?”

“I have two answers to that question.”

These words garner another communicative inhale from Myka; this one, Helena translates as “If you do not start providing said answers with a quickness, your ability to do so in any foreseeable future will be severely curtailed.”

With that quickness, Helena says, “One, I was transported to a street corner that was not this one, and then, attempting to replicate the effect, I was in similar fashion returned to this one.”

“And two?” Pete asks. He’s looking at her with appraisal. More so than usual.

She says, “I believe that I died and was then brought back to life.”

“What,” Myka says. Flat.

“I’m sorry. I hold it as a strangely fervent belief. I know it is untrue—that it must surely be untrue—and yet. But you should ask Ramon what happened to him.”

“Tell the tale, Ramon!” Claudia commands.

Ramon, for his part, is more than enthusiastic about complying: “It was _incredible_. I never thought my mom was talking about _real stuff_ , you know? It was all just scary stories, keep the kids close to home, right? But it’s _so_ for real! The first time, he just confused me, like they do, but the second time!”

“He who? The second time what?” Claudia asks.

“Riding a tikbalang! You don’t know, but—”

Claudia interrupts, “C’mon, I know what a tikbalang is. I watched Lost Girl.”

“Aw, you should check out the comics too, man. Some from when I was a kid, but there’s even more now. Like, now that I know, it’s amazing how right they get it!” Then he pauses, as if realizing how odd it is to be speaking about comics, and their rightness, under the circumstances. “But I guess I gotta ask, why’d a tikbalang confuse us over to 20th and then let us ride him back here?”

Pete says, “Hold it.” He asks Helena, “That’s where you blinked out of here to, during your little near-death experience?”

“Not _near_ death. Death.”

“I don’t care.”

Claudia says, “That’s a little insensitive, big guy.”

“The street sign did say 20th,” Helena affirms.

“And here we are on Taylor,” Pete says. “Put those things together, and you know what you get?”

Helena sighs. “Something Roentgen Files–related, no doubt.”

“You just get weirder. No: _Bullitt_.”

“Toldya,” Claudia says, with a little poke at Helena’s upper arm.

Pete goes on, “I bet they’re just moving you around. To where it happens.”

“To where what happens?” Claudia asks.

“The chase. All the streets, the pings. I shoulda put it together. One of those other streets, that’s where this one took you. And then another one brought you back. That’s what they did, right?”

Helena nods.

Claudia does not. “They? They who? The aliens? She said she wasn’t abducted!”

Pete shakes his head. “I pay a lot more attention to what she _does_ than what she _says_. Makes her easier to understand. And I was watching her, right before she blinked out. Gimme that fantastico goo gun of yours.” Claudia excavates the implement from the depths of her satchel and hands it over; he points it up, and he shoots the streetlight. A spark or two ensues—but that of course might be the result only of mixing electricity and a conducting liquid. He says to Helena, “Okay, guinea pig. Try it again.”

After a moment of hesitation—one for which she berates herself as a coward—she does as he says. Nothing happens. She smiles at him. “Pete, you do surprise me.”

He says, “I get that a lot. Particularly from you.” But he smiles back.

Claudia is looking from Pete to Helena and back again. “Wait, are we done? _What is happening_?”

“I bet we gotta drive around some more,” Pete says. “Goo a buncha lights.”

Ramon says, “I’m with Claudia: what _is_ happening? You guys, am I in some weird government experiment? Does the government have like a herd of tikbalang?”

“Does that make sense to you?” Claudia asks him. “As an explanation? Or have you ever done anything like, say, mushrooms?”

“I used to run around some.”

“We all did,” Pete assures him.

From Myka, there is an ill-tempered “I didn’t.” Her tone says that she is still not at all thrilled with Helena, or indeed with anything about the situation.

Helena ignores this for the moment and says, “Of course we did. I, for example, did indulge in opium.” She gives Claudia a pointed look.

“I _knew_ it!” Claudia says.

Yet another, even more ill-tempered “I didn’t” from Myka.

“Didn’t what?” Claudia asks. “Indulge in opium, or know that H.G. did?”

“Both.” And as Myka says this word, Helena receives a familiar “why can’t you tell me these things” glance. The eyes delivering that glance continue to be not at all googly.

Claudia says, “You know, Ramon, I think maybe what we’ll go with is, having done whatever running around you did? That might make you susceptible when some tikbalang guy comes a-calling.” Ramon looks as if he does want to believe her, and she takes that as encouragement. “I mean, who’d put it past the government to have herds of unicorns and whatever else, right? But they probably wouldn’t’ve been able to guess that _today_ their employees would catch a ride with a guy who’d know a Filipino beastie if he saw it. And they couldn’t’ve reached into your head and figured out _that’s_ the herd they’d need to rustle up this afternoon.”

“But can we get back to the comics at some point?” Pete asks. “Because pretty cool that whoever wrote those got it right. I’d love it if I found out that the Sandman was really exactly like what Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean and everybody came up with.”

“Sandman isn’t real,” Claudia scoffs.

“Ramon thought this tikbalang critter wasn’t real.”

“I was _so wrong_ ,” Ramon rhapsodizes.

But this exchange has Myka’s attention. “Wait,” she says, and her ill temper is gone; this is her agent-voice. “The government wouldn’t be able to reach into anyone’s head and find anything. But something did, and it found something different for Helena than it found for Ramon. Why did it? If this is only about movement from place to place, I mean. And for that matter, why is that movement happening via streetlight?”

Claudia says, “Trust you to come up with the work-related questions. Let’s see if Artie and Steve have anything to contribute.” She Farnsworths and inquires about San Francisco’s streetlights: if there is anything strange, anything new about them. Steve eventually comes up with… a nonanswer. “They’re replacing their old lights with LEDs. But the project’s been going on for a while now, so I don’t see—”

In the background, Artie exclaims, “Oh! LEDs.”

“Oh LEDs what?” Steve asks him.

“I had a feeling this might start happening at some point.”

Myka leans over to the Farnsworth. “You had a feeling _what_ might start happening?”

Artie’s face appears. He looks displeased… but of course he usually looks displeased. “They’re—how to put this?—absorbent. Energy-wise. Fortunately it takes them a while to… take it all in.”

Claudia says, “LED lights are cheap paper towels?”

Pete muses, “So if those cheap paper towels were shining on a bunch of streets, and something major had happened on those streets…”

“But what do lights shining on streets have to do with aliens?” Artie asks.

“Yeah, that part I still don’t get,” Claudia says. “Also why Ramon went into a comic book, and H.G. thought she left her wallet in the afterlife.”

Helena says, “The mind is happy to make up a story…” Myka looks a question at her, and she shrugs. “I remember thinking that, as it was happening.”

“But why do you _believe_ the story?” Myka pushes.

Pete’s eyebrows rise. Then he grins a very wide grin. “You know what?” he says. “I think I got this one! With the assist from H.G.! It’s continuity. Because there’s really none of it in that chase in the movie. You cut from street to street—well, technically Frank Keller cuts from street to street, and you gotta give it to the guy, because he had to work with the shots they gave him—but anyway it doesn’t make any geographic sense. Like none _at all_. You go around a corner, and it’s totally a different street. Different part of the _city_. In the movie, all you need to know about what’s happening is that it’s a totally awesome car chase, so who cares? But if it happens to you, here in the _world_ , you gotta make sense of it somehow. Give it some continuity!”

Myka says, with a distinct lack of belief, “And to do that, most people went with alien abduction?”

“But not Miss ‘I Never Heard of the Roentgen Files’ over here!” Claudia crows.

“My aliens did not waste time on abduction,” Helena points out. “Perhaps only the people who did find explanatory solace in alien abduction felt compelled to tell their stories to others? Or at the very least, to tell those stories in a way that would, when coupled with curiosities, come to the Warehouse’s attention. And alien abduction might be quite a convincing explanation, to those whose minds turn to it. I, on the other hand, understand perfectly well that I did not in fact die and come back to life. And yet.”

“And yet what?” Pete asks.

“And yet I _did_ in fact die and come back to life.” How ludicrous she must sound.

Claudia, for one, does not seem to care. “Whatever you say, resident-alien Jesus. So Pete, I guess we gotta go goo whichever streetlights, then try to talk the hippies out of energy efficiency? Even if we do, though, I really don’t see how we’re gonna keep this from happening over and over.”

Helena suggests, “We can look into their manufacture, these LEDs. Surely we can intervene in some relevant way.”

“Sabotage!” Claudia enthuses.

Ramon says, “Oh my god, it’s a mirage.”

“Is it?” Helena asks. She notes that Ramon has put on sunglasses, and—

Pete exclaims, or rather sing-songs, “I’m tellin’ y’all, it’s sabotage!” Then he says, “Good one, Ramon. You are a man with excellent taste. Seriously, we gotta talk comics.”

So there is most likely no actual mirage… Helena envies Ramon the shaded view, however. “It _is_ quite bright,” she says aloud.

“Aw, but poor H.G., you don’t _have_ any sunglasses,” Claudia says, and Helena hears nothing even vaguely resembling sympathy in her voice, “because you’d have to _carry them_.”

“You would have anticipated my need for them, were you a decent butler. But alas.”

“Did you just call me an indecent butler?”

“If the sunglasses fit, darling…”

“You won’t sound so smug about it when my ‘Never Had an Indecent Butler Like Me’ number brings down the house, Pops.”

Myka tells them both, “I really do not understand your relationship.”

Artie squawks from the Farnsworth, to which everyone has stopped paying attention, “I do not understand a single thing you lunatics say and I am hanging up on all of you people!”

“Hanging up on people,” Ramon says. “That reminds me, I gotta call my mom, let her in on what happened. Blow her mind.”

“Hanging up on people reminds you to call your mom?” Claudia queries.

“Reminds me _of_ my mom. Cell phone drives her crazy; she says it hangs up by itself. Pretty sure she really does it with her face.”

He moves near his car and makes his call… Helena eavesdrops, just a bit. She presumes he is speaking Tagalog, in that his syllables, rhythms, and stresses are melodious yet on the whole meaningless to her. A word or two of Spanish, perhaps, as he had suggested, and also the occasional English: she hears “awesome” said with particular intensity. Then he winces. She suspects his mother might be inquiring as to whether he has taken up again the habits that occupied him when he “ran around some.”

Myka draws Helena’s attention away when she says, “I honestly can’t believe you got yourself not just whammied, but double-whammied. You know, I expect this kind of thing from Pete.”

“Reasonable,” Helena says. She is continuing to find it a bit difficult to focus; a part of her wants to concentrate all her resources on the truth of her death and resurrection. To embrace it fully, not merely philosophically…

“Hey!” Pete objects, and the familiarity of his protest is a comfort.

“Shut up,” Myka tells him. “This whole thing is actually your fault.”

Helena says, “Technically I believe it is Claudia’s fault—”

“Now it’s my turn: hey! Whose team are you on?” Claudia says.

“Yours. But you did not allow me to finish: your fault, but also Myka’s, because she is softhearted and believes in backup.”

“It isn’t softhearted to believe in backup,” Myka says.

“I did not say I attribute softheartedness to you _because_ you believe in backup. I said you are softhearted _and_ you believe in backup.”

“I’m not softhearted,” is Myka’s response.

Claudia snorts. “I wish Steve could’ve heard you say that. He’d be making his weird little ‘does she know she’s lying, and if she doesn’t know, how do I tell her’ face.”

Pete says, as if it is a revelation, “He _does_ make a weird little face like that. He makes it around Myka a lot.”

“So,” Helena says, “comprehensively, she is softhearted, believes in backup, and may make a habit of lying to herself with regard to herself.”

“Is there some reason you’re all picking on me?” Myka asks, resignation edged with resentment.

“Fills the emptiness in our souls,” Claudia says cheerily.

Pete says, “I was gonna go with ‘makes you make a weird little face of your own, Mykes,’ but the empty souls thing works too.”

“And what about you,” Myka says to Helena.

“Perhaps I’m hoping you’ll exact _revenge_. Later. For my having raised the specter of your softheartedness and prompted such agreement on the point.”

“Perhaps that revenge won’t take the fun form you’re imagining.”

“Perhaps you don’t fully grasp my definition of fun.”

It’s a bit perfunctory, this back-and-forth, but it prompts Claudia to say to Pete, “I really do not understand _their_ relationship.”

“I really do not _want to_ understand their relationship,” he tells her.

Helena tells Myka, “Speaking of fun, or the lack thereof: you won. Your team neutralized the artifact. One of the artifacts, at any rate.” She kisses Myka—this time on the mouth, not the cheek—to indicate that her earlier words had indeed been token, that they had no real purpose. That certainly she intended no real annoyance. That she needs comfort from this, too.

Myka’s eyes do soften as she says, “You think I find that rewarding, do you?” And those words are no challenge. Instead, they are, Helena feels, the soft beginning of their move back to the hotel room.

So for Myka’s ears only, Helena says, “I certainly hope so. If not, there has been a significant dropoff in your appreciation for my performance, this morning to now.”

“Hey, as the team member who actually did the gooing, I won too,” Pete says. “Maybe even more.”

Myka moves only slightly away from Helena as she says, “If she kisses you, I will kill you.”

“Might be worth it,” Pete says. He is jaunty now, Helena thinks, just as he was after the “chase”: happy to have won in whatever way he feels he has.

“How true,” she agrees.

Myka says to Helena, “If you kiss him—in fact if you kiss either of them—I will kill _you_.”

To Pete, Helena says, “I’ve kissed you before. Not worth it.” He pouts a bit, but Helena turns and assesses Claudia. “You, I don’t know.” But she shoots a sidelong glance at Myka, and she gets the desired response: Myka says, with a bit more fervor than is called for, “Don’t find out.”

“Don’t,” Claudia seconds. “I like my life. So what if I’m a loser at transportation roulette?”

Pete shrugs. “Nah, I give. You can totally have a car chase in your little not-quite-taxis. If Ramon’s driving, anyway, ’cause he’s a boss.”

“I’m switching to Lyft anyway. Better corporate culture. I wonder if Ramon would too.”

Pete, moping, says, “Won’t matter eventually. All the cars’ll be driving themselves.”

“All that means,” Myka tells him, “is you can spend your time watching _Bullitt_ on your phone or whatever entertainment system a self-driving car would have.”

“I guess you’ll just do paperwork,” Pete sighs.

“Not if she’s in a self-driving car with me,” Helena tells him.

“Keep your self-driving sex-taxi fantasies to yourself,” he says.

Helena raises an eyebrow. “I might have been about to say that we would engage in Platonic dialogues.”

“Wouldn’t be much _platonic_ about any dialogues you two engaged in,” Claudia says.

Myka sighs. “Some days I miss being single.”

“I bet you do,” Pete says. “So sad that you’ll never reach that dream of sitting in the back seat of a self-driving car all by yourself, doing paperwork.”

“I might read,” Myka says.

Helena offers, “You might in fact read a Platonic dialogue. The Apology, perhaps.”

“That seems more up your alley,” Myka says, with a smile, “given that it’s the one where Socrates defends himself for corrupting the young.”

“I have corrupted no one!”

“To hear Pete tell it, you’re taking me for rides in self-driving sex taxis. I was a fine, upstanding Secret Service agent before I met you. A pillar of law enforcement.”

Claudia says, “I’m ruling from the bench: you’re guilty, H.G. She really was a pillar before you showed up. Her posture was _amazing_.”

“There is nothing wrong with my posture now!” Myka objects.

Pete says, “It’s really too easy. Too easy and too dirty… just like Myka, these days.”

“Please go away,” Myka says. “Forever.” She might mean all of them, Helena included.

“You’re not really mad, are you? We’re still partners, right?” Pete asks, in that cajoling way he does.

“Of course we’re still partners, in the sense that we are. But if you steal any more time from my vacation with my different-sense partner, I will be rethinking.” And Myka says this in the way that _she_ does, when responding to Pete’s wheedling; it is a long-suffering, yet oddly tender tone, and she reserves it solely for him. Helena consistently must work not to envy it. Sometimes she succeeds.

“Fair,” Pete says.

“Be happy,” Myka tells him. “You got your car chase.”

Cajoling again, Pete says, “You have to admit, it was amazingly cool.”

“I don’t have to admit any such thing.” Long-suffering. Tender. Then she smiles at Helena and says, in a loud whisper, “Don’t tell him, but I had my eyes closed the whole time.”

Pete sighs. “Where’s your sense of adventure? H.G., I wouldn’t _bother_ taking her for a ride in a sex taxi, if I were you.”

“Oh, Pete,” Helena says. “How you underestimate me. Not to mention, the extent to which Myka is… adventurous.”

Pete blinks at Helena. He looks at Myka, and he blinks again.

Myka thumps her fist against his upper arm, and he winces. Helena would be more inclined to let him imagine what he likes—he certainly could never even _approximate_ the reality—but Myka tells him, “Wash your brain out with soap. And since nobody’s going away like I asked, in spite of the fact that I did it really politely and said please, _I_ will go away. Helena, you can come with me, but only if you promise you will never utter the word ‘adventurous’ again.”

“In public, correct?” Helena asks. “Versus private.”

Myka makes a sound very like a growl. “Since you don’t know the _difference_ , it’s a blanket ban.” Pete opens his mouth to speak, and Myka says, “I swear to god, Lattimer, if you tell me it’s a bad idea to ban blankets, that’s _it_.”

Pete closes his mouth.

****

Ramon drives Helena and Myka back to their hotel. Helena herself feels, and she believes Myka and Ramon also feel, it as a welcome exhale.

Ramon says, “This kind of wins the crazy-trip prize. Like, trip like trip, and like _trip_. Don’t give me less stars, but—”

“No need to apologize,” Helena tells him. “We frequently win prizes for which the primary judging criterion is ‘crazy.’”

“Speak for yourself,” Myka says, but without much force.

“My dear,” Helena responds, equally mildly.

Myka closes her eyes. “Fine.”

Ramon says, “Wins the awesome-trip prize too. But that’s really more like _trip_.”

“Understood,” Helena assures him.

Ramon consults his telephone as he pulls to the curb in front of the hotel. “Huh,” he says. “Here’s a funny. About the trip, and it’s kind of more like _trip_ too. You know how you’re supposed to pay for your Uber through the app?”

“No,” Helena says.

“Okay. Anyway, that’s what you do. What Claudia was supposed to do.”

“All right. I’m failing to appreciate the comedy thus far.”

“So here’s the thing: she set it up so the payment’s cash.”

Myka, who is almost, awkwardly, out of the car—she really did not fit into it properly to begin with—pauses and says, “You can’t pay for an Uber with cash.”

“Right. Not here in old USA. But you know where you can?”

“You are about to say ‘the Philippines,’” Helena guesses.

“Other places too, but yeah. This trip? Got sent through the Filipino app, then back to me. Claudia a genius or something?”

“Yes, a genius,” Helena says.

“But also something,” Myka adds.

“Anyway she stiffed you,” Ramon concludes.

As Helena exits the vehicle, she says to Myka, “I hope you are, as I am, appreciating the irony of this entire situation being the result of your having maintained that ‘stiffing’ Pete and Claudia on the relatively minor bill for our lunches would have been inappropriate.”

Ramon is out of the car as well, and he is saying, with apology, “It’s not cheap. We drove a lot.”

“This is in some way related to limbo, or possibly _the_ limbo. Would you like to estimate the cost of your shock absorbers as well and allow me to reimburse you now?”

“You sure? I can try to bill Claudia or her boss or whoever once I get a estimate.”

“I would not put you through that. Sometimes it is the better part of valor to surrender.”

“The money?” he asks.

“The money, the point, the flag, the fort, the entire cause. I am learning that pragmatism can be the wiser approach.” Myka snorts out half a chortle. “ _Striving_ to learn it,” Helena amends.

“My mom, she’d like you. Because you know what she’d say about you? She’d say you’d make a good Catholic.”

“That is…” Helena pauses. “It is an unexpectedly lovely compliment. Thank you. And please give your mother my regards—insofar as I am any judge of such things, she raised a fine son.”

He hugs her. It is strange but also quite sweet.

“This has been a most bizarre afternoon and evening,” she says as they let go of each other, at the same time, in the awkward-yet-appropriate way that embraces can end. “But you’ve dealt admirably with every bit. Thank you.”

Myka smiles at them both. “And thanks from me, Ramon. Mostly for complimenting this one. She deserves it.”

“You’re all right too, lady in question,” he says.

Once they have settled up—Helena hands over every bit of cash she possesses, plus all of Myka’s as well, and Myka expresses reluctance on the point of this latter participation until Helena reminds her that she could in fact have kept Pete from leading them in his “chase” if she had really tried, thus obviating the need for repairs—Ramon inserts himself into the small maroon car and drives away. Helena is made nostalgic by the furious horn-blares that attend his nonchalant movement into the stream of traffic.

****

“Alone at last,” Helena says, once they are, in fact, alone, at long last, in their room.

“Feels a little weird. Any aftereffects for you? From the whammy? Whammies.”

“I’ll echo you: feels a little weird. Or perhaps I mean, on my part, a little sad.” She does not want to make more of this than it is, but it _is_. “I find myself unaccountably despondent at the mismatch between my fervent belief in having been resurrected after perishing and the apparently contradictory reality.”

“You want to believe?” Myka asks.

Helena grimaces. “I suppose that, like everyone else, you are _intimately_ familiar with the Roentgen Files television program. And film. And imaginary musical.”

“I thought I got that joke, before, but maybe I didn’t get it in its fullness.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. ‘I Want to Believe’ would be, according to Claudia, the closing number of the first act of the Broadway-musical version, which does not exist but which Claudia would pay Hamilton money to see. I gather that is a large sum. She would also pay similar monies to see a Warehouse musical, in which you and I would sing a love duet entitled ‘The Price Is Too High.’”

“If it’s Hamilton money, then yeah, the price probably _is_ too high. Anyway, you can’t sing. I can’t either.”

“Our parts would be played by professionals.”

“That’s good. I’m sure the audience would appreciate it. Although weirdly now the idea that I’ll never sing a love duet on Broadway with you makes _me_ a little sad.”

“Take comfort in my embrace,” Helena suggests, and Myka moves to do exactly that as Helena goes on, “in which you may stand while I refrain from serenading you.”

“Now it feels like I really did win something.” She leans down to kiss Helena, but then her telephone makes its noise that signifies a call from Pete. Myka says, “Don’t worry; I’m not answering. He’s just being a pain.”

That is true: if it mattered, Pete would use the Farnsworth. But this does put Helena in mind of another point, one that she most likely should have considered before now: “Perhaps he is calling to inform you that Claudia still has my Farnsworth and my telephone.” Myka exhales meaningfully, but Helena reminds her, “I did, as instructed, keep my hands on my Tesla.”

“Still a little less than impressive, given the whammying, but at least you’re armed. Can you live without a phone for four days?”

“I lived without one for well over a hundred years.”

“That in no way answers my question.”

Helena says, “I can certainly try. Perhaps it will mean fewer interruptions at the very least.”

“Even fewer if I turn mine off.” A musing tone. A tease, too.

“Would you?” Because if Pete is in a mood to torment them…

Myka says nothing. But she does move away from Helena, and she does take up her telephone. Seconds later, Helena hears a brief, tell-tale buzz. Then Myka says, “Now. I think we have more than twenty minutes.”

But when Myka puts her hands on Helena, she moves as if they have far less time than that. In the past, of course, such desperation could not help but characterize their intimacy; back in the beginning, nothing could be fast enough, intense enough, due to desire’s bright necessity of course, but also to the demands of secrecy, the pressures of stolen time…

This extremity has a different quality, however; Myka’s hands are working fast, yet not with abandon, so that she seems hurried, but to some purpose other than physical satisfaction, the particular haste of which Helena knows quite well. This seems more like… making a point? Solving a problem?

Whatever it is, it is uncharacteristic. “Your pace seems a bit… breakneck,” Helena says, as her shirt is, with alacrity, being unbuttoned, pushed from her shoulders, and let fall to the floor.

Myka pauses, then laughs a little. “Just call me Steve McQueen.”

“If that is yet another unpalatable cocktail that might be but is not, I will… well, do nothing, probably, other than sigh.”

“No. Not a cocktail.”

“A movie? And a guy in the movie?”

“Your speech patterns always get weird when you spend time with Claudia. It’s not a movie, anyway, but it is a guy in a movie. I mean, an actor in a movie.”

“Which, I now deduce, must be _Bullitt_. Due to my superior deductive powers.” It’s a halfhearted vaunt; she is trying to overcome whatever is keeping her from responding as she should, as she wants to, as she under any other circumstances would if Myka were so bodily insistent.

“Superior,” Myka echoes. “Pete would be making you watch it right now if he were here. Fortunately he’s not,” and she returns to her tasks: lips on neck, hands hard at work, hips pushing Helena backwards to the bed.

Helena is trying to participate fully—trying to ignore whatever is wrong, wrong with both of them—when an abrupt sense of something being _no longer the matter_ overtakes her. She stops moving entirely, the relief is so strong. “I did not die,” she says.

“I _know_ that,” Myka says, but her voice is restless. “I know it, but I can’t help—”

“No, I mean I no longer hold my death and resurrection as a conviction. I suspect Ramon no longer feels so certain that he traveled in his mythologically inspired way.”

“They got the other streetlight,” Myka says, and Helena nods, for that is what must have occurred. And that that is now what _must have_ happened, not her own death, seems a liberation of the most palpable sort. Myka goes on, “How do you feel? Still… despondent?”

“Not nearly so. Although I do I feel a bit sorry for Ramon.” She feels a bit sorry, in fact, for all the previous believers. How are they responding to having their fully embraced beliefs in their abductions, or whatever they chose to give continuity to their experiences, taken away? “Not that I can’t feel despondent on my own recognizance, but I do feel much more myself.”

Myka says, “You’ve been trying really hard, since it happened, to be yourself. Say what you’d say. Banter.” Helena acknowledges this insight with a nod, and Myka goes on, “Ramon gave himself over to it—and I bet he wasn’t despondent at all. But yours was really a balancing act. A kind of ‘I know very well, but nevertheless.’”

“I did _want_ to give myself over to it., but perhaps I’m genuinely incapable of belief. Perhaps that’s the real reason for the despondency. I would make a terrible Catholic after all.” It is brooding and self-pitying, but also most likely true.

“Or maybe it’s just that some cheap-paper-towel artifacts didn’t have nearly enough mojo to convince you. To make you let go of what you know very well.”

“You are playing to my vanity,” Helena accuses. Myka just smiles a little, then kisses her without urgency. Helena further accuses, “You think I am an egotist.”

“No, I know you’re an egotist.” And Helena can’t muster a true smile or laugh, because Myka is of course _right_. She is stuck between being pleased with and resentful of Myka’s acceptance of this fact for what it is.

“Your face just now,” Myka says, with a shake of her head. “Am I ever going to love anything in my life as much as I love you?”

“As an egotist, I’ll say ‘Of course not.’ As a pragmatist, I’ll say ‘I don’t know.’”

“I like how, just like that, you’ve maneuvered me into rooting for egotist-you over pragmatist-you.”

“As an egotist, I’m quite practiced at such maneuvering. As a pragmatist, less so. However, both the egotist and the pragmatist are ready to declare that they are unlikely to love anything in their respective lives as much as they love you.”

“I bet that’s not really true about the egotist.”

“I think it’s to the egotist’s _credit_.”

“Oh I _see_. She can _preen_ about it.”

“She _is_ an egotist.”

“She’s pretty good at making me feel pretty good. Maybe it’s warranted.”

“She is _transported_ to learn that both of those things are the case.”

“Just so you aren’t transported out of this room, that’s fine. Just so you stay here with me.”

“I certainly intend to,” Helena says, striving for lightness, because while she can feel Myka trying for the same thing, there is a shadow in Myka’s voice that should not be there, a shadow in her voice as there had been in her hurried hands. It should not be there; why is it there?

And then she has her answer. “Don’t die,” Myka says. Her voice now is low and her brow is knit: she is serious.

So. Of course Myka knows very well that Helena did not die, just as Helena knows it. Yet while Helena’s now-nullified “but nevertheless” had been “I believe that I did die,” Myka’s was—is—“I am reminded that Helena someday will die.” And that cannot be so conveniently neutralized away.

Helena is inclined to offer, in response, something that would itself fall under some heading of “I know very well these words are preposterously untrue, but nevertheless I will say them in order to offer false comfort”—something such as “I won’t.” Or “I’ll try not to.” Even “Not for a while yet, I hope.”

But Myka deserves better than that. So instead Helena offers a counterproposal: “Deathlets?”

At that, Myka shakes her head, her forehead still unsmooth. But her mouth begins to turn, slowly, and at last the smile breaks over her beautiful face. Finally, now, she laughs, and the shadow is gone.

Tomorrow morning, the first kiss will taste of toothpaste and coffee.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 5 tumblr tags: here endeth the tale, and it's a silly one, about whammies and Former Files and musicals and hip-hop and the hideousness of LED lights, but it's also kind of a serious one about knowing very well but nevertheless, which is, if you know your Freud, how fetishistic disavowal works, but if you know your poststructuralists and deconstructionists, you know also that it's about everything from ideology to language, all the logically incompatible beliefs we maintain in order to function in the world, and exercise power over it, and take pleasure from it, you can't have love in the absence of a willingness to disavow, even if all you're disavowing is the mourning in which you are always already engaged


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